The brother we knew was never coming back

One winter day six-and-a-half years ago, I was driving down the Garden State Parkway in a storm of freezing rain, traveling with my parents from Brooklyn to Lakewood for a relative’s bris.

My hands were clenched on the steering wheel, and I was driving slowly and very carefully, due to the weather conditions, when we passed a slew of emergency vehicles at the site of an accident. With a silent tefillah that no Yid should be harmed, we continued on our way.

About five minutes later, my mother’s cell phone rang, and a few moments after she answered, she slapped her leg really hard.

My first thought was: Oh, no! Did we forget the bris outfit?

For a while my mother could not talk, but finally she blurted out, “Yanky and Avi were in a bad car accident.”

I immediately pulled over to the shoulder of the highway.

“Yanky will be okay, Tzippy,” she continued, clutching the armrest. “But Avi” — her voice dropped to a raspy whisper — “Avi is unconscious.”

“People lose consciousness all the time, and then they recover,” I assured her.

But in my own mind I was already carrying on a very different dialogue with Hashem. Please don’t take Avi away from us, I begged silently. Let him have a full recovery. Please, please don’t let there be any long-term negative effects.

Avi was the youngest in the family, ten years my junior, and from the moment he was born, he was the biggest brachah to our family. A delightful child, he quickly earned a special place in everyone’s heart, and as he grew older, his many gifts became increasingly apparent: He was blessed with a winning personality, a kind and giving nature, a bright mind, and a great sense of humor, and he was good-looking and athletic, to boot.

A hardworking eleventh-grader, Avi would rise each morning at 6 a.m. to learn with his chavrusa in shul, after which he would head to yeshivah to learn. At night, after seder, he would relax by playing basketball with his friends. Any task that had to get done, he was happy to do; when he built our succah, playing lively music as he worked, the whole family invariably congregated around him, because it was so much fun to be in his presence.

He was also exceptionally sensitive to other people’s feelings. Once, he went on a skiing trip with his friends, and when he returned, I asked him whether he had braved the most challenging slope. “No,” he said.

“Why not?” I asked in surprise.

“Because I saw that one of my friends was scared to do that slope, and I didn’t want him to be embarrassed, so I told him I didn’t want to do it, either.”

Avi’s rebbeim loved him and would frequently call “just to give some nachas.” When my father would walk to shul with him on Shabbos, his face would beam with pride.

I couldn’t bear the thought of my baby brother being any different from the way I knew him. My mind jumped to the worst-case scenario: What if this turned out to be a life-altering injury? We could not handle that.

As these thoughts swirled around in my head, I called my sister to tell her we wouldn’t be making it to the bris, and replaced our destination in Waze with “Jersey Shore Hospital.”