The days following the accident were the longest days of our lives, filled with questions that no one could answer

Friday night, July 6, 2018.

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.

My parents and siblings flew out to Ibiza immediately, while my husband and I followed on Sunday, leaving our children, ages two and a half and ten months, with my in-laws. Behind us on the plane sat a couple of boys who were Jewish but nonobservant, and were on their way to Ibiza to party, like Daniel and his friends. I turned around to these boys and told them about his accident.

“Please, can you pray for him?” I pleaded. “Can you just say the Shema as a merit for his recovery?” They were a little taken aback, but nodded somewhat apprehensively.

Nobody should ever have to see a loved one in the state I found my brother in as he lay unconscious in the hospital. Daniel was tall, broad, and muscular — he worked out regularly — and I couldn’t help but weep upon seeing his hulking frame attached to maybe a hundred tubes, wires, and machines. The doctors had managed to drain the fluid from his lungs, but they said his condition was critical, and they were unsure whether he would live — and if he did, what his life would look like.

The days following the accident were the longest days of our lives, filled with questions that no one could answer. Would Daniel ever regain consciousness? Breathe alone? Open his eyes? Would he be paralyzed? Brain damaged? What on earth had happened to my strong, kind, handsome brother?