After my last journal entry of celebrating life by way of my birthday, I'm very sorry to have to follow it with death. On Wednesday, April 16 at 8 AM my dad picked me up, saying my brother was in the hospital. Knowing how healthy he was and that it was so early, I knew it was an emergency. The short of it is, Brian Hardin, my brother for the past 27 years, died at 2:16 PM. I cannot go into too many details now but I will have another journal dedicated to him. For the time being, please read this: [link]ersonId=107829355 It's hard to describe how awesome my brother is in so few words; in fact, he managed to make the front page of the local paper... that's just how he rolled. The title of this journal, which was how one of my little cousins (by little I mean 22), described him and I couldn't agree more. He was insanely brilliant and brilliantly insane, always the life of the party and he knew EVERYONE. You think I jest, when I went to buy a suit for the funeral, the guy who serviced me ended up knowing Brian from an old Jujitsu class he took in high school AND this guys wife worked with Brian when he was a Physical Therapy Tech at a local hospital. Seriously, we're going to need a larger funeral home...

And although both my parent's and I have had a REALLY rough time since Wednesday, I've done more laughing than crying because A) Brian really burned the candle at both ends when it came to living life; another little cousin wrote "remember him as he lived, not as he left," and B) he'd call me a pansy if I cried too much. So in some ways this is the hardest thing I've faced in this 30 years of life but more often than not, Brian had so much energy and there are so many memories of him, it's hard not to enjoy remembering them all. A few days before he died, the guys at work had ordered Chinese food and at the time I didn't understand my fortune, which was "Treasure your great memories and you will need not worry about ending a banquet." As long as we have memories of him, he lives on. Not only that, he was an organ donor. The cause of death was blunt head trauma so he was able to donate numerous organs, I hope. I have not heard everything he was able to give yet. So mental and physical portions of my brother live on, in this I find comfort and joy.