Fragments

“How will we ever be happy again?”

“How will I spend a lifetime without him?”

“My head is swimming. I feel underwater.”

“Did he know how much he meant to me? Did I tell him I loved him enough?

How is he gone?”

“The tears won’t stop and I can’t get out of bed.”

“This is so painful. How does anyone survive this?”

“Why is my faith in the crossfires again?”

“I wish it had been anyone else but him.”

“I’m angry. I’m angry. I’m angry.”

“It feels like there’s a hole in my heart that is hemorrhaging.”

“How are we supposed to do this?”

Lines from journal entries stare back at me.

A paper trail of heartbreak, anger, answerable questions, and crushing, relentless waves of sadness. All the messiest fragments of grief. What has surprised me the most about grief this time around is that it isn’t easier.

I thought having lost a child that losing my brother wouldn’t feel as hard— or that I’d be more prepared for grief.

But what continues to shock me is that all of it is still just as hard, just as heavy, just as dark, and just as painful— but this time I’m less open to it. My heart has retreated to an unreachable stony place. An “I-don’t-want-to-feel-this” and an “I-can’t-do-this-again” place.

I’m running from it. Failed attempts to avoid the unavoidable.

I hate how messy grief is.

“The only time I cry is every time I get in my car.”

The opening line in my journal today.

I finally stopped skipping the song Preston showed me a couple of months ago that we both liked. I let it play on the way home from dropping kids at school.

It felt like a personal calling card from Preston.

As the singer sang these words I let myself remember him and cry:

“But if I must be a memory won't you frame me in a way that you will smile when you're picturing my face.”

After loss it feels like floating around in space with fragments of life swirling around that don’t make sense. Everything is out of order, the world is suddenly wrong, and there’s no gravity to get your bearings back or stand up.

So you float. And you drown. And you hopelessly flail about trying to make sense of the fragments— what do you hold onto and what do you release?

But today I found a beautiful fragment from my brother to hold to while I struggle with the sharp and heavy broken pieces that remain.

Again— from my brother:

“Won't you frame me in a way that you will smile?”

So I want to share a glimpse of Preston because the fragments of what we have left of him are too beautiful and too good not to share.

Thanks to our dear family friend Travis Brunstead for putting this video together for us.

You framed him in a way that makes me smile.

No, we didn’t get enough memories, conversations, or time with him to a fill lifetime— and it’s going to take a lifetime to make sense of the fragments he left behind— but who Preston was, and with everything Preston did he gave us a beautiful twenty one years.