I have been trying to avoid this for a couple of days now because I honesty did not want to face the reality of something so heart breaking. You were like a brother to me. In fact your were. Tucker Brantly Arnold, I miss you more than you can imagine. These last couple of days have been such a bur for me and I haven’t been able to be in content with life. I don’t understand life sometimes and the tragedies that come with it, but I guess I am no one to question it. 

Remember when you were around 9 and I was about 12 and we got all the christmas decorations and made a little tent with a christmas tree inside full of christmas ornaments? Or the time you and I were sitting in your top bunk bed and you dropped Cotton Tail from the top bunk bed? haha  I remember I got so mad at you for that but couldn’t help but laugh along with you. Remember when my mom would take us to the park and you would teach me how to rollerblade? It should have been the other way around but lets face it, you were a pro when it came to anything with wheels. And also the time I would come spend the night at your house and you and Elli would fight about who I was going to sleep with that night. Eloise always won but one night somehow I was able to convince you to let Eloise sleep in your room. You, Elli and I slept in your small bed which I’m not sure if I regretted at the time or not because you would not stop farting that whole night. Gross! We didn’t end up going to sleep until five am that night and thats only because your dad kept coming in telling us to go to bed or if not I was going to have to leave the room. Somehow I managed to quiet you down and get ya’ll to bed. And let’s not talk about the beach house because I will be typing all day. Oh how I miss that place! There are so many memories we made when we where younger, back in your Blink-182 obsession- which I listed to all the way to your memorial service. We didn’t make much memories anymore after you left off for high school, most of them were when we were younger. I wish we could have continued to make more but with you being miles away kinda stopped it. But when I was lucky enough sometimes I was able to see you when you would come down to Houston and we were able to sit down and catch up. 

I’m so happy for you. I have never met such a caring, charismatic, honest, ambitious, adventurous, hilarious, and courageous man like yourself. You know what I love most about you? Is that even though you loved getting into trouble sometimes- pull some crazy stunts! You always were so honest about it. You were the type of person that would mess up, accept your faults, gets up, learn from it, and grow. You didn’t sit around and whine and let things magically come to you. You ran straight for what you wanted no matter how scary an obstacle was. And because of that you grew up to be such a gentlemen and a beautiful person.

In a dark room you could stand in the middle and light everything up. How the heck are we going to be able to live without you? Seriously. How? I really wish I can push a button and bring you back to us. Nothing makes sense to me at the moment and the only thing I know is that life is so unfair to us sometimes. But there is a beauty in everything, even the ugliest thing has something beautiful about it- we just have to discover it. Death is ugly. Death rips the living out of the people who are still alive. And I don’t know if i’ll ever be able to find beauty in this, but I do know that you will guide me to it- someway, somehow. And you will also continue to light up our paths. But for now, I will hold on to our memories- that will live with me day after day for the rest of my life. Tucker Brantly Arnold, it was a blessing and an honor to have you in my life for 13 years, my most memorable childhood memories came from you.
I love you, rest in peace Tuck you will forever be missed.

One of our family's favorite Tucker memories is the time when he rescued our pet cockatiel, Latte. Late one Sunday morning, coincidentally while Tucker's mom, sister Lyda, and dog Maggie were visiting, Latte decided that at last she knew how to fly and took off out of our front door and down the street. We chased and tried to catch her through several backyards, and even from a couple of rooftops, but we could not coax her to come to us and back home. Eventually she really found her wings and took off above the treetops and across Woodway. Everything we read online said it was extremely rare that fly-away birds ever came home, so we were sure she was gone for good. There were a lot of tears in the Kirkwood household that afternoon and evening, as well as worries about her survival.

After school the next afternoon, we got a call from some neighborhood kids several blocks away that could see a white cockatiel in a tree from their backyard! So our kids headed over to see if they could catch her again. Lyda (coincidentally again) happened to be visiting other neighbors next door and heard all the commotion! So she rode her bike home to get the one person she knew who could climb any tree and coax a bird out of it - who else would you get? Tucker didn't hesitate and climbed several stories up to get the bird. He managed to not only coax her into his hand (see picture), but into a bag so he could hand her down the tree! He's definitely our hero!

Of course the story doesn't quite end there ... somehow in the short process of thinking we'd lost Latte for good and actually geting her back, we managed to get 4 more birds ... so the kids, of course, had to name one of them "Tucker"!