Vanessa Bryant Gets Emotional in Snapshot Alongside Photo of Late Husband Kobe

Vanessa Bryant will always love her husband. This weekend, Kobe Bryant will be inducted into the Basketball Hall of Fame, and Vanessa just shared an emotional tribute to him. She went to Instagram to post a picture of herself leaning on an oversized photo of Bryant, who died in a helicopter crash along with their 13-year-old daughter Gianna and seven other people in January 2020. In the caption of the image, Vanessa wrote “Love you always” while tagging Kobe and Gianna.

Bryant, who played for the Los Angeles Lakers from 1996-2016, will be honored by Michael Jordan at the Hall of Fame ceremony. He leads the class of 2020, and the ceremony was postponed from last year due to the COVID-19 pandemic. There will also be a Kobe standalone exhibit, which Vanessa helped designed, called Kobe: A Basketball Life, according to the Los Angeles Times. The items featured in the exhibit will be “portions of the court at Kobe’s high school in Pennsylvania, as well as replicas of the five championship rings he helped the Los Angeles Lakers win,” as mentioned by PEOPLE.

“Vanessa really wanted the space partly to be reflective, and so Dear Basketball brings that part in,” the hall’s historian and curator Matt Zeysing told the Los Angeles Times. “… She wanted a space for if someone wanted to just reflect for longer than even 30 minutes that they would have the opportunity to do that.”

Back in March, Vanessa spoke to PEOPLE about coping with the loss of Kobe and Gianna. “This pain is unimaginable [but] you just have to get up and push forward,” she says. “Lying in bed crying isn’t going to change the fact that my family will never be the same again. But getting out of bed and pushing forward is going to make the day better for my girls and for me. So that’s what I do.” Vanessa also talked about how Kobe and Gianna give her inspiration whenever she is feeling down.

“I guess the best way to describe it is that Kobe and Gigi motivate me to keep going,” she stated. “They inspire me to try harder and be better every day. Their love is unconditional and they motivate me in so many different ways.”