Sixteen. Eighteen.

Loss doesn’t arrive politely. It doesn’t wait until you’re older, steadier, more prepared. Sometimes it comes far too early—before you’ve even figured out who you are.

I was eighteen.
My brother was sixteen.

Sixteen feels impossibly young when you look back on it. It’s unfinished. It’s becoming. It’s plans and jokes and moments that still should have been ahead of him, not behind. When a drunk driver took him, it didn’t just take his life—it shattered the timeline we were supposed to share.

At eighteen, you’re barely standing on your own feet. You’re still someone’s kid, still figuring out the world. And suddenly, grief becomes something you have to carry before you even understand what it is. There’s no roadmap for losing a sibling that young—no way to make sense of how life just… keeps going when theirs doesn’t.

There are things that stay with me. The way sixteen looked on him. The things we didn’t get to say. The years I’ve lived that he never got the chance to reach.

And then, as life went on, loss didn’t stop there.

My sister—thirty-seven—gone suddenly from a bilateral pulmonary embolism. Leaving behind a son.
My dad—taken in a way that still doesn’t feel real.
My grandmother—another goodbye in a year that held far too many.

One year. Three losses.
But the first fracture happened when I was eighteen, and my brother was sixteen.

And somewhere in all of this, there was my faith.

I leaned on it because I didn’t know what else to do. When everything felt out of control, faith was something steady to hold onto—something that told me there was meaning, even if I couldn’t see it. It gave me words when I didn’t have my own. It gave me a place to put my grief when it felt too heavy to carry by myself.

But I also questioned it—deeply.

I asked the hard questions you’re almost afraid to say out loud. Why him? Why so young? Why so many losses, stacked into one life, one year? What kind of plan includes this much pain? There were moments when faith felt less like comfort and more like something I was wrestling with—something I didn’t fully understand, and sometimes didn’t even recognize anymore.

And somehow, both things were true at once.

I held on, and I doubted.
I prayed, and I questioned.
I believed, and I struggled to believe.

Grief and faith became intertwined—not cleanly, not perfectly, but honestly.

That kind of grief doesn’t fade—it changes shape. It grows with you. It shows up in the person you become, in the way you see the world, in how deeply you understand that nothing is guaranteed.

I still carry him with me. Not just in memory, but in the quiet ways he shaped who I am. In the ache, yes—but also in the love that never had a chance to run out.

Sixteen.
Eighteen.

Some numbers don’t feel like numbers. They feel like moments frozen in time—moments that changed everything.

And somewhere in all of it—through the questions, the anger, the silence, and the searching—I’m still standing in that space between grief and faith, learning how both can exist at the same time.