Nine years ago today, we lost Drew. That is 3,285 days. 78,840 hours. I have counted.

Grief that size doesn’t arrive with a promise of survival. It arrives like a wall of black water, and it consumes everything. You have to learn to float before you can swim.

Nine years of navigating grief teaches you things you never wanted to learn, but had to. It teaches you that the water doesn’t disappear — you simply get better at reading it. The turbulence that once overwhelmed becomes the turbulence you learn to navigate.

Ernest Hemingway wrote in A Farewell to Arms:

“The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places.”

He also wrote what people rarely add:

“But those that will not break it kills.”

Nine years of evidence tells me that is true.

Drew knew turbulence. He chose it deliberately. As a United States Air Force pilot, he strapped in knowing the conditions demanded everything he had. He didn’t navigate despite the turbulence — he was trained to navigate within it. That is a different thing entirely.

His life was cut short at 26. But the character he carried into that cockpit — and into every relationship, every moment of service — that did not die on March 14, 2017.

In cultivation, broken soil is not damaged soil. It is prepared soil. The breaking is what makes it ready to receive.

Drew’s life and service mattered then. I need you to know — and I need to know — that it matters now. To every leader who flew with him, trained beside him, or carries his memory into the battles of today: you are part of what he left behind. That is not a small thing.

Sadness. Pride. Love. Loss. And the knowledge that life moves in only one direction.

Today we will honor and remember. And we will continue swimming.

Tempus Maximize!