Oliver Tree died on June 14 in a midair collision between two helicopters in Rio de Janeiro. He was 32. Five other people died alongside him. This isn’t a story about one famous death. Six people didn’t come home that day.

The victims were Tree; Argentine YouTuber Gaspar Prim, known as Gaspi; director Lucas Vignale; music producer Lucas Brito Chaves; and pilots Alexandre Souza and Charles Marsillac. Tree and the other three passengers were aboard Souza’s helicopter, while Marsillac was flying the second aircraft alone. Our condolences go to all of their families, not just Tree’s.

In the weeks since, fans have been circulating things Tree said, in his own words, before any of this happened. None of it is a prophecy. But it’s hard to read now without feeling something.

“I can die at any time”

In a previous interview that resurfaced widely after his death, Tree recalled losing his cousin to spinal meningitis when he was 13. He said the loss sent him into years of drug use, and described an LSD trip in which he imagined watching his own funeral, an experience he called a “rebirth.” He said he woke up the next day and realized he was still alive, and that the experience convinced him he “can die at any time.”

That conviction, by his own account, pushed him further into addiction before music eventually became what pulled him out. He spent years afterward staying sober, on record about the fact that he’d nearly lost himself before he found his way to what he actually wanted to do with his life.

None of that is about foreseeing a helicopter crash. It’s a story about surviving one kind of death, at 13, and spending the rest of his life aware that time was borrowed. But read today, “I can die at any time” no longer sounds like an observation. It sounds unbearably personal.

The interview that came out after he was already gone

Two months before he died, Tree sat down with the Zach Sang Show and walked through his will in detail. He said his family wouldn’t inherit his money and that his estate would instead support a foundation aimed at funding young artists. He said people would finally appreciate his work once he wasn’t around to make more of it.

Grief makes pattern-seekers out of all of us. We’re the ones who changed, not the words.

Then, on what would have been his 33rd birthday, a conversation he’d recorded with Bobbi Althoff before the crash was released publicly for the first time. In it, he talks about how “high-risk” he lives his life, without elaborating on what that meant. It arrived about two weeks after his death.

What we’re actually looking at

We’re not going to tell you Oliver Tree knew. We don’t think he did, and treating a string of quotes like a prophecy does something we’re not comfortable doing: it turns a real person’s death, and the deaths of five people who never chose any of this attention, into a puzzle for strangers to solve.

What we think is actually happening is simpler and, honestly, more human. Grief makes pattern-seekers out of all of us. When someone is gone, everything they ever said about mortality gets reread in a different light, because we’re the ones who changed, not the words.

What matters more is what Tree did with the time he had: he created work that took real risks, and planned for his estate to support artists who were still here to create. If there’s meaning in any of this, it probably isn’t that he knew what was coming. It’s that he tried to leave something behind for people who didn’t.

Donations in his memory can be made through Dr. Oliver Tree’s Extremely Epic Art Grant for Baby Geniuses at olivertreefoundation.com.

Sources: Associated Press, NBC News, KTLA, Billboard, Stereogum and TMZ.