RJ Harber says his family believed they had taken every precaution before devastating floodwaters surrounded their cabin. As the situation turned critical, his daughters managed to send one final message telling him they loved him, and he immediately grabbed a kayak in a desperate attempt to reach them.

In the year since RJ and Annie Harber lost their young daughters in the Central Texas floods, getting out of bed has become difficult. But they carry on with a purpose.

“We get up truly every day to honor our girls because that’s what we taught them,” Annie, a 44-year-old teacher, tells PEOPLE.

RJ, a 45-year-old attorney, says they’re also speaking out to keep 11-year-old Brooke and 13-year-old sister Blair “alive in this world” after the Guadalupe River flooded on July 4, 2025, killing the girls and his parents, who were vacationing together in Casa Bonita, a small community of cabins in Hunt, Texas.

When tragedy struck, the couple was at their own cabin, while Brooke and Blair were staying with their grandparents Mike, 77, and Charlene Harber, 75, at a friend’s place a couple of doors down.

At 12:30 a.m. local time, RJ checked his phone and saw a flash flood warning, but it wasn’t for Kerr County. He went back to sleep, but woke up to thunderstorms and heavy rain around 3:20 a.m.

Ten minutes later, he says his wife “asked me to go check on the girls because we thought they might be scared.”

That’s when he put his foot on the floor and noticed that their cabin was flooding — and quickly.

RJ says they escaped through a window and while he grabbed a kayak, Annie tried to swim to the girls, but both kept getting pushed around by the water.

“I made it about a football field, and I was about 25 feet from the girls and that’s when a swell pushed me about 10 feet into a cabin that was on stilts,” he recalls.

There was just one house left between him and his girls, but although he could see them above the waterline by several feet, he just couldn’t get directly to them. “Then I remember a car nearly capsizing me, and then a tree came at me,” he says.

Although he doesn’t remember how he eventually made it back to safety, he says he believes “the only reason” he and his wife survived is so they can “keep spreading the joy and happiness that was the girls’ lives and to do something good in their honor.”

Since then, the couple — who have been married since 2010 — launched a fund to support other flood victims and matters that were near and dear to the girls’ hearts.

The dad says Blair, who dreamed of becoming a veterinarian, changed their “world” when she was born.

The 13-year-old girl — who the parents lovingly called B — “was just the sweetest, kindest, gentlest soul you could possibly know,” RJ adds. “But she was also very smart and athletic. She was a wonderful baker and chef.”

And Brooke, who wanted to be a zookeeper when she grew up, was quite a “ball of energy,” the lawyer says. She learned to walk quickly as a baby and was very athletic — excelling “at every single sport that she played” from lacrosse to baseball.

“Our weekends were just full of all these sporting obligations and things like that,” RJ says. “Now it’s just silence.”

For RJ, although he is able to separate the “wonderful memories” from the tragedy that followed, he says they’re “not rebuilding our house” — and they haven’t been back to the area since either.

To this day, the parents still can’t quite believe what happened.

“The worst part is, the point of having the river house was to spend time as a family in nature,” RJ says. “We were doing all the things you’re supposed to do as a family and with your children. And that’s what took our girls, and my parents. We thought we were doing everything right.”

Through their heartbreak, RJ shares that Annie motivates him each day. She wakes up at 5:30 a.m. and walks with a friend for two hours, and that dedication and her perseverance have inspired him.

“We want to live a life that honors them trying their best,” he adds, while their faith and loved ones have held them up as they brace for their new reality.

In the future, the couple hope to have a child together in some shape or form one day, not to replace their girls, but instead to “expand on the love that we already gave them.”

“We hope to live good, upright lives just to honor them and to keep their legacy going and the legacy of my parents,” he says.

One detail that he has taken comfort in has been their daughters’ final acts. At the same exact time RJ put his foot on the floor in their cabin that night, the girls, whose bodies were found together, texted them stating, “I love you.”

They sent an “I love you” text to Annie’s parents as well along with a photo of the four of them together.

“I think that’s another thing that keeps me going is that in our last moments,” he says, “it’s love that we’re thinking about, that love is the most important thing there is.”