Grace Upton

A memorial service for Grace will be held at 10 a.m. Friday, January 19 at Sparkman/Hillcrest Funeral Home in Dallas.

There is no easy way to tell it. Grace's family is in agony. Her father, John Hughes, and stepmom, Hannah Hughes, are left to navigate a strange world without their daughter.

Two extended families (including Grace's biological mother Carolyn O'Briant, grandparents Janis Craft O'Briant and Cecil O'briant; Steve and Merrilee Hughes and Great Grandmother Jinx Hughes and Rick Babb; seven total siblings, Aunt Christy, Uncle Josh and sibling-esque cousins Cole, Morgan and Lauren, and Cole's daughter Isabelle, Aunt Colleen and Uncle Chunk and Owen and Conor Conlon along with innumerable more relatives, teachers and friends) contributed to Gracie's upbringing. Therefore, her sudden tragic death has left a heap of hearts and lives shattered.

We are holding one another as we piece things back together, but none of us will ever be the same. We mourn both Gracie and the selves we were before this happened.

In Man's Search for Meaning, holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl wrote, "Suffering ceases to be suffering at the moment it finds meaning.”

So we do and say all we can to make something meaningful of this suffering. In this case, we think it is important to share the hard part of her story.

Gracie and her friend died together on an ordinary Tuesday afternoon from an accidental poisoning of fentanyl. Our hope is that in telling this heartbreaking detail we might shed light on this growing crisis and possibly save another child's life.

One in five youth deaths in Texas is caused by fentanyl. Increasingly, it is found in all manner of black market drugs. There are a number of efforts underway, from various angles, meant to reduce the carnage. For now, you can share Gracie's story, talk to your children about drug experimentation and keep your eyes open for realistic ways to help.

The easy part is telling you about the amazing person Gracie was, the way she lived.

While some members of her paternal family can be high-spirited, loud even, Grace's temperament was more stoic, resembling her brother Britton and Great Grandma Jinx. For that reason, her smile — it meant something. Getting Gracie to laugh felt like unlocking a magical-treasure chest. The warmth of it could melt you.

Her bedroom is meticulously organized and aesthetically soothing, a characteristic of Gracie's personal spaces in every place she lived, even when things around her were chaotic. Her favorite artwork, a dozen or her little sister Norah's originals are carefully pinned around the mirror Gracie peered into each day as she brushed her shiny blonde, then black hair which hung past her shoulders.

She created art — colorful landscapes, cartoon characters and sketches of the dogs she loved, Bruno, Seamus and sometimes Pippa (she and the bulldog had a complicated relationship).

You would be hard pressed to find anyone during Gracie's earliest years who did as much to ensure her safety and comfort as her grandmother Janis, and Gracie never took that for granted. She adored Janis. In summers, Grace frequently visited her grandfather Cecil in California, a trip she anticipated and talked about year round.

Grace would drop almost anything she was doing to spend time with her maternal brothers Cameron, Cori and especially Tristan, her protector and friend, with whom she shared a close bond.

The Hughes family is still mourning the April death of Grace's grandmother Merrillee Hughes.

Sitting on Gracies' bed last week, Norah (while hugging a stuffed pink bunny, a gift from her sister) insisted that Grandma was right there to greet Gracie in heaven, where "she gave her a hug, showed her around, and then they went to ride horses and play the piano."

John and Hannah and Britton and Liam helped to broaden Gracie's appreciation of music. There was the boys' beloved Queen whose concert the family attended (sans the late great Freddie Mercury). She dabbled in Willie Nelson and George Strait. On a family trip to Utah she memorized the words to Bob Segar's Against the Wind. They recall singing it over and over .. and over and over again.

Her parents disagreed with her opinions on rap music and tattoos, but they loved Grace so much that disapproval came gently, in the form of an eye roll and a grin, or in Hannah's case, a reluctant mother-daughter trip to the tattoo parlor, from which stepmom emerged with a pierced nostril.

In road trips across Texas and Utah and adventures on faraway islands, Grace traveled the globe.

She hiked muddy trails in Austin, weathered sunburns, mosquitos and questionable Texas beaches. She watched Lauren graduate college in Denver, snorkeled the waters of Turks and Caicos, zip lined over Costa Rican jungles (where she also rode horses in the shallow surf and shared cumpleaños cake with Cole's wife Taylor) and, with her hair in long braids, she buried Liam in the Cabo San Lucas sand and balanced an iguana on her sun-kissed shoulders.

Like the Vincent Van Gough and Salvador Dali paintings Grace admired at the MoMA in New York City — like the lives of Alexander and Eliza Hamilton, which she learned about in Lin Manuel Miranda's eponymous musical that she loved — Grace's world was filled with nuance, complexity and some measure of mayhem.

Gracie loved people, many who desperately needed it, and even some who didn't deserve it. Though she suffered sometimes and had good reasons to mistrust, Gracie never closed her heart. She had no hate in her. She was incapable of intentionally hurting anyone.

We walk this earth knowing everything can change in an instant. It is a scary uprooted feeling. We seek assurance and understanding. Some of us search in dangerous places, too far, go over the edge, accidentally before we mean to, surrendering our physical selves. That is what Grace did.

We don't know what awaits us on the other side, But if there is judgment, atonement, reward for loving others — that sort of thing — Grace is at ease, in euphoric celestial tranquility beyond anything she experienced or sought out on earth. For she was a child, blameless, a victim of inexplicable inescapable draw and of unjust circumstance.

As we seek the meaning of this suffering, here's one thing our hearts know: If you love people and they love you — children, parents, spouses, friends — the kindest thing you can do for them is survive. Whatever you are going through, find a way to protect your health and your life, especially if you are the child of a living parent, for nothing is worse than losing your child.

As Jay Neugeboren wrote in his WWII novel An Orphan’s Tale, “a wife who lost her husband is a widow. A husband who lost his wife is a widower. A child whose parents died is an orphan, but there is no word for a parent who loses a child. That's how awful the loss is.”

Grace is preceded in death by Grandma Merrilee Hughes and Great Grandfather Tom Hughes.

She is survived on her paternal side by John and Hannah, Norah, Britton, Liam and Anthony Hughes. Grandpa Stephen John Hughes, Great Grandmother Jinx Hughes, Aunt Christina Hughes Babb and Uncle Josh Babb, Cole, Morgan, Lauren and Isabelle Babb and Taylor Babb, Aunt Colleen and Uncle Chris and their boys Owen and Conor, Aunt Mallory Allen and her children Emily and Maddie, Hannah's parents Mitch and Michele Allen, and too many more loving aunts, uncles, cousins and friends to note.

On her maternal side, Grace is survived by her mother Carolyn Upton, Grandmother Janis Craft O'Briant and Grandfather Cecil O'Briant, brothers Tristan, Cori and Cameron, their children, and a host of other relatives and friends.