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     Sometimes, a person comes along with enough light to brighten the whole room, no matter how absent the light may have been before they arrived. Dustin was that person. He had the ability to make you laugh even when you were in the foulest of moods. As a matter of fact, he was the kind of guy who would get increasingly angry with you if he wasn’t able to cheer you up in an amount time that satisfied him.


That’s just the kind of person Dustin was. The motto of the family has always been “One Love,” and he took that with him everywhere he went. You would always know that he had entered the room (if you didn’t, he’d be sure to tell you!), and you better believe he would not have any sulking or sadness while he was around. He always took care of those around him and put the people he cared for first. He welcomed his friends into his family as if we were all blood related, and he would never let you think you weren’t. To Dustin, we were all family.


To me, Dustin was always family. We spent the better half of our lives together—all the struggles, the growth, the pain, the blessings. It’s hard to even write the words to a story that doesn’t feel like it’s ended. I suppose that’s because the story has not ended. Dustin is here with all of us, you see, because the impact he had on our lives will never be replaceable. But when we mention the good, I would be amiss to not mention the struggles.


You see, Dustin had his own struggles that he carried the burden of for a very long time. While understanding the struggle of addiction seems a distant possibility for many of you who have never dealt with it first-hand, there are those of us who have grown up in an environment where it’s impossible to get away from. The loss, the anger, the feeling of helplessness. Our demons take many forms and sometimes the battle gets overwhelming. The weight of generational pain and exposure to the hurt caused has lasting effects on us.


For Dustin, alleviating that was making sure his friends and family were okay. He put everyone else ahead of himself. It’s something I always made sure to fuss at him about, but in retrospect, what a blessing it is to have someone who is so selfless he would literally take the shirt off his back in a winter storm if he knew it would make you comfortable. It’s just the kind of person he was, and no amount of yelling “think about yourself, too!” was going to get you anywhere.


So, here I am. Writing to say that we do sometimes lose our battles with our past. Sometimes, we are tired of struggling. Sometimes, the burden is too heavy. And that’s not to comment on a lack of strength: quite to the contrary, some of the strongest people I’ve ever known also struggled with these fights after a lifetime. But it’s not the losses that we remember: it’s the insistence on making sure everyone around us is okay, it’s the memories that will never fade, it’s the laughs we’ve all shared and the pain we carried for each other everyday to help support the weight for one another. These are the things that will live on forever within each one of us as we reflect on how lucky we are to have shared our lives with such a person.


A person that touched many lives and never forgot to remind you that he was there. Now, I want to begin to return the favor. His family welcomed us like we were family, and now they need our support.


I’m reaching out today to ask for assistance in covering the costs related to the loss we are all carrying right now. I don’t even like referring to it as a loss; it feels like such an understatement and a lackluster word for the impact he had on all of our lives. He would probably fuss at me for even saying that, “you didn’t lose anything, shut up, you’re always so dramatic.”


Well, I’m sorry for being dramatic, but you’re going to have to deal with it, brother. I want to attempt (and I’m sure I’ll be much less successful than you always were!) to return some of the love and light that you brought to all of us by extending it to the family. Any little bit helps, even if you feel like it won’t be enough. The family deserves our support right now for bringing us someone who so many of us have been able to call best friend since before we were even able to drive.


I, too, have taken “one love” to heart. And now I want to return that love that was extended to me. Thank you for taking the time to read this, and I hope that you can share this to any you feel Dustin had an impact on. Please share your stories and your memories. It’s what we have now, and those stories and memories will help serve as a reminder as to why we’re all brought together here in the first place: the extraordinary person that was Mijit.


-Words courtesy of Eric