Kaia Gerber has shared another raw message about grief on Instagram, six weeks after her brother Presley Gerber died at age 27.
The model, 25, posted a passage from Joan Didion’s 2005 memoir “The Year of Magical Thinking” on her Instagram Stories, offering followers an unfiltered look at how she is processing the loss.
The Didion quote she selected reads: “Grief, when it comes, is nothing we expect it to be. Grief has no distance. Grief comes in waves, paroxysms, sudden apprehensions that weaken the knees and blind the eyes and obliterate the dailiness of life.”
This latest post arrived just over a month after Kaia’s first public tribute to Presley, which she shared on October 18. That earlier message accompanied a collection of photographs and videos showing the siblings through the years.
“I love you the bluest, to the moon and back and back again, forever big brother,” she wrote in that October post.
The emotional core of Kaia’s tribute centered on the inadequacy of language itself when confronted with profound loss. She explained that she had turned to literature searching for answers, only to find that articulation falls short.
“I don’t have the words. And maybe the tiny mercy is that we didn’t need them all along. Words fail and words subtract and words summarize and words always lack truth. And how naive of me to believe that language could transcend grief. I’ve read all of the books and i have none of the answers. My articulation is no match against this, the magnitude of losing you.”
She continued in the same post, describing the overwhelming nature of love that has lost its object. “i had more love for you than i knew what to do with. And now that it has nowhere obvious to go, i’m certain it’s going to swallow me whole.”
Presley Gerber died on September 20 at a rehabilitation center in Los Angeles, according to reports. He had worked as a model and photographer, following his mother Cindy Crawford into the fashion world while also pursuing his own creative projects.
The brother and sister grew up in the public eye as children of one of the most famous supermodels of the 1990s. Presley launched his modeling career as a teenager and later developed an interest in tattoo artistry and photography, documenting his work and travels on social media.
Kaia’s decision to return to Instagram with another grief message rather than retreating from public view marks a continuation of her willingness to process the loss transparently. Her choice of Didion, whose memoir chronicles the year following her husband’s sudden death, signals a deliberate framing of her experience within a recognized literary tradition of mourning.
The Gerber family has not issued a formal statement about Presley’s death, and Cindy Crawford has remained silent on her own social media channels since the loss of her son.
Kaia’s modeling work resumed in late October, with appearances at industry events signaling a gradual return to professional obligations while she continues to mourn publicly through her social media posts.