If a person could be a sunrise, Kody would be the kind that stops you in your tracks—the kind that spills gold over the world so effortlessly, it makes you wonder if it even knows how beautiful it is. He never had to try to be warm, or kind, or good. He just was.

If Kody could be captured in a single word, it would be love. Love without limits. Love that didn’t ask who you were, what you had done, or where you had been. He loved everybody unconditionally—without hesitation, without judgment, without expecting anything in return.

He was such an amazing person, the kind of soul that only comes around once in a lifetime. As a child, he was pure light, full of wonder, growing into a young man who never lost that spark. And when he became a man, he carried that same warmth, that same magic—only deeper, stronger, shaped by the years, but never dimmed by them.

His smile—those dimples—could brighten even the darkest day. His presence was a force of good in a world that needed more people like him. He was Kangamus, a nickname as full of life as he was, a reminder of the joy he brought to those around him.

Oh, if only time had been kinder. "I’d give anything to go back six days before he left," his family says. "I could only do that if I knew what I know now." But love does not work in reverse. Love cannot undo time. It can only hold on, fiercely, even in the face of loss.

And hold on, they will. Because they have always been proud of him. "I've always been so proud and always will be." Proud of the way he lived, of the way he loved, of the way he saw the world not as it was, but as it could be—with kindness, with laughter, with an open heart.

Kody was not just passing through this world. He belonged to it. His love is stitched into the people he left behind, woven into the stories they tell, the memories they keep. And as long as those stories are told—as long as his name is spoken—he is here.

Kody is not gone. He is in every quiet moment where kindness triumphs over cruelty. In the way the wind moves through trees, unshaken, unafraid. In the feeling of being seen, truly seen, by someone who never asked for anything in return.

He was an ocean. And though we cannot stand in his waves anymore, we will always feel the pull of the tide.