A week ago, my phone charger cord had just broken, and I needed to go find a new one. It was Sunday evening in Grenoble, France, and everything shuts down at 2pm. To top it off, it was raining.

“Took [your niece] to the sportsman show on Friday and this picture is yesterday when we took her back home.” Read a text from my dad. The image still downloading because the data on my phone is fairly slow in France.

My toes getting a little wet. I continued to walk, keeping my fingers crossed that a shop might be open because my phone held my train tickets the next day, and of course I didn’t have access to a printer.

Then the image came through.

They were at the site of my brother’s car wreck. His site of ascension as I call it, where his spirit last had physical contact with this earth.

My heart ached.

After coming back empty-handed, I started the most recent episode of This Is Us, where they finally revealed the death and the family begins to process. What didn’t affect me from the episode a week before was digging a little deeper.

I felt it. Back to where I was three years ago, when my 27-year-old brother fell asleep at the wheel, and all I could think was why?

But sometimes things in life don’t make sense, and that’s all it is.

You’ll drive yourself crazy trying to answer such a question. I still do sometimes.

But even though someone is gone, they still live on in these memories you have of them. They live in this heaven that their energy created in your life, in your heart.

I’m happy to be in the mountains on this day. He used to live in the mountains for a few years where he worked as a chef at a lake resort. He ended up moving into town, but one of the last things he was trying to do was move back.

So when I think of the mountains, I think of him. It’s nice.

And now, one of my newest and best friends has the same name. I say his name and in these moments my brother continues to live.

“Ryan!”

Nostalgia.

What actually ever dies if we keep it alive in our memories?

What can you ever actually forget?

In science, the Second Law of Thermodynamics shows us that matter is neither created nor destroyed. The energy just changes.

What was becomes something else.

I guess Buddhism and reincarnation finally makes a little sense to me. My brother is not dead. His body may be, but his Ryan-ism (the energy that which is his existence) continues to live on in just a different form.

So what now?…

I’m hitting the slopes in Val-d’Isére and spending some time with my Big BoBo in the French Alps for a third-year anniversary of new life.