The days following the accident were the longest days of our lives, filled with questions that no one could answer
My husband and I were hosting 11 guests (back in those pre-Covid days, that was still normal) in our home in London, plus our own two young children, and I had just served the chicken soup when the phone began to ring. And ring. And ring. My husband and I locked eyes across the table, and I knew something was dreadfully wrong. But the incessant ringing eventually stopped, the meal resumed, and I forgot all about it.
Just before dessert there was a knock at the door. In walked my eldest brother, Maurice, his face a ghostly white. He drew me aside and told me that our youngest brother, 26-year-old Daniel, who was vacationing with friends in the Spanish island of Ibiza, had been found face-down in a hotel swimming pool.
“He’s on life support now, Elora,” he told me. “They don’t expect him to survive the night.”
I come from a traditional English family, and although my parents always harbored warm feelings toward Yiddishkeit, and my siblings and I attended Jewish schools, I’m the only one in the family who embraced Jewish observance.
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