“I keep thinking about how when we were little, I got scared before getting my ears pierced, so you went first.” — Kaia Gerber

Kaia Gerber shared those words on Instagram on October 18, part of a tribute to her brother Presley. Presley, the son of Cindy Crawford and Rande Gerber, died on September 20, 2026, in a rehab facility at 27. His cause of death hasn’t been disclosed.

The line reaches back to a childhood moment, when a scared little sister let her brother test something frightening first. Kaia, 25, turned that memory on its head after his death, when she held the earring taken from his body. “You always went first. But when I held the earring they took from your body, all I could think was: that belongs to you,” she wrote. “And I really f***ing wish you hadn’t gone first this time.”

Being his sister, she wrote, was her favorite thing about herself. She described a brother who believed in people’s goodness and met cruelty with confusion and curiosity. “You believed people were inherently good because, Presley, you are inherently good,” she wrote.

She recalled something he’d recently written about: a dream in which animals fled a fire and entered a lake. He’d wondered, “If fear makes type of animal not matter.” Kaia wrote that he’d left her with the answer, and that whatever kind of animal she’d been before losing him no longer mattered.

“I was born loving you. I will die loving you. There was never anything else,” she wrote.

Her message moved through the daily things she’s learning to do without him, including telling him something without calling his phone and being his sister when she can no longer reach for him. She paired it with a childhood video of the two of them dancing and an image of them by the ocean.

Earlier that day, the family honored Presley in a statement on Crawford’s Instagram, remembering his kindness and vulnerability and expressing gratitude for their 27 years with him.

Kaia closed by telling her brother she’d choose their time together even knowing the grief that would follow. “I would walk knowingly toward this grief if it meant that on the other side of it I got to be your sister,” she wrote.