TERRI AND TODD MONKEN
Will Ferrell has nothing on him … Todd Monken calls himself the original funeral crasher, frequently borrowing the line — “grief is nature’s most powerful aphrodisiac”— from the movie Wedding Crashers. It always gets the Tampa Bay Buccaneers’ offensive coordinator a laugh. “We joke about it,” he said, “but the Lord works in mysterious ways. We would not have met if not for losing a loved one.” Todd and his future wife both were plugged into the sports community in 1985 at the College of DuPage in Glen Ellyn, Ill. “Todd was on the baseball team, and I was a pom-pom girl,” Terri Monken said. “So we knew of each other, but had never actually met.” They were brought together when three young men working as summer camp counselors died in a car accident. “One of the boys was a friend of mine and one was on Todd’s baseball team,” Terri recounted. In Wedding Crashers, actor Will Ferrell plays a guy who goes to funerals just to meet women who are likely to be receptive to some comforting. In the Monkens’ story, “we were waiting in line at the wake and I backed into him,” said Terri.
Today, shared happiness replaces the sadness Terri and Todd Monken of Davis Islands faced when they were bought together through the deaths of college friends in Illinois. Photograph by Monica Herndon
A little later, Todd sat across from her at a restaurant where friends gathered. “This was the first time I had lost someone my age,” she said. “My emotions were raw.” Todd and Terri, now 51, connected again at the funeral and began dating soon after. That fall, Todd enrolled in Knox College in Galesburg, Ill., where he lettered in baseball and football, a gifted quarterback who set eight Knox records. Terri, meanwhile, went to work as a health insurance plan administrator. “We talked almost daily,” she said, “and that was before cellphones.”
They were married in 1991 and have lived in nine cities, all moves for Todd’s coaching career. They now own a home on Davis Islands and would be happy to stay put. “Life is a roller coaster, filled with excitement and disappointments,” Todd said. “You don’t think that a funeral will turn into the greatest moment of your life where you meet your soul mate.” — Amy Scherzer
We joke about it,” he said, “but the Lord works in mysterious ways. TODD MONKEN We would not have met if not for losing a loved one.” FEBRUARY 2017
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