Although just 10 months apart, Tyler Joyce was not just my older cousin. He felt like another brother of mine. We were together essentially from birth and throughout the years, that didn’t change.
There were the constant sleepovers that went on for days on end in the summer and we were always excited to see each other at family events. We spent a lot of our childhoods together creating lifelong memories, from trips to Canobie Lake Park and Water Country every summer to using our youthful minds to create wacky, fun scenarios with the bins of toys we had. We would create funny, or so we thought, videos for our YouTube channel in the hopes of becoming the next big viral stars and go around Saugus causing havoc with his friends.
Sure, we had a few fights from being around each other so often, but eventually we would hug, make up, and act like nothing had happened. Tyler was someone I looked up to, and I thought he was one of the funniest people alive. The way he could easily make friends and adapt to any social situation was something I was slightly envious of at the time, but respect now.
Something I do know is that he always had my back, in real life and in “Call of Duty” Zombies, a game we spent countless hours playing together and bonding over. Video games were something that we heavily connected with. For him, it was “The Legend of Zelda,” “Pokemon,” “Mario,” and “Sonic.
” I was more into racing and wrestling games. Even though our interests in video gam.