Almost a Year

This post is a bit more sentimental than most of our posts. Usually, we have a fairly clumsy, optimistic, and normal life, but today will make two days until one of our closest friends has been dead for a year after a tragic accident at work.

If you haven't already checked out the blog his wife began in memory of him and to document a journey she took to Alaska, leaving little "pieces" of him along the way, it's a great blog. You'll need tissue, but it's a beautiful memoir: www.PiecesOfPlumey.blogspot.com.

The reason this is so important to me and has affected me so deeply is because his wife happens to be my sister, Amber, the other writer on this blog. And her husband happened to be one of my closest and most dear friends.

I am honestly unsure how it's been a year already. One of the worst years of my life. The worst year of Amber's life. But we're both here almost a year later.



Death is so difficult when it's someone you love. Sometimes I feel like he never existed. As though he's a great story you tell at dinner or sitting around a fire with your friends. The best kind of story. Who would have thought that a real person could have been loved and liked and cherished and trusted the way Justin was? Who would have ever thought that anyone besides a celebrity could have boasted 800 people at their funeral. What sort of person causes an entire crew to honor him by demanding to carry his body out once he was found? How does a chemical plant general manager become so attached to one of his workers that he stays away from his family on Christmas weekend for 36 hours and continually breaks down in tears with the family? What kind of man has that affect on those around him?

Justin did. He was that man.

I hate how much I took him for granted, but now I realize how much I appreciated and loved and trusted and relied on him. He was one of my best friends, like a brother. It was only natural when Amber and Justin announced they'd be getting married.

Almost year. How did that even happen? This year has been the worst and best of my life. And I can't even begin to imagine how Amber's actually dealt. I've learned so much that I'd have never learned if he wasn't gone. But then again, I'd not have wanted to learn.

I still love and miss my friend. And I love you, Sister.