It was a long time ago, 19 years, toward the beginning of our lives together

He knew there wasn’t much hope, and as a right-handed person, he was anxious about being able to write

It’s marked on our wall calendar every year: Sivan 22, also known as the yahrtzeit of Abba’s fingers. Macabre humor, I know. We try using other words like “the anniversary of the accident” or “the day we make a seudas hoda’ah,” but it often comes back to “the finger yahrtzeit.”

It was a long time ago, 19 years, toward the beginning of our lives together. This was before we had kids, and teaching was everything to me: meaning and comfort and the wonder of a class of six-year-olds learning Bereishis for the first time. On the day of the accident, I was giving over perek beis to a roomful of wide eyes when the knock on the classroom door jolted me. I remember being frustrated. What could anyone want? What could be more important than this?

A close friend stood there, a nervous look on her face. Before I knew it, a substitute took my place in class, and I was ushered into her car.

“I don’t have good news,” Briny said — and my mind flew to my mother, who had been sick for a while. “Deborah, Emmanuel had an accident.”

Ah, Emmanuel. My husband of two-and-a-half years was strong, young, and in so many ways, infallible. A car accident. How bad could it be?

The police had informed my in-laws, Briny said, but they hadn’t contacted me — and they had mentioned only that it was outside of Sheffield.

Briny took me home. I washed dishes as she sat on the phone at my tiny kitchen table trying to piece together the story, and more importantly, to locate Emmanuel. There are three hospitals in Sheffield, and she made call after call, begging bored receptionists for information. Finally, we hit gold: Northern General Hospital in North Sheffield.

Emmanuel had embarked on a fundraising trip for his kollel, driving a rented Ford Fiesta from Gateshead to London. The drive is 286 miles, most of it a straight motorway. Sheffield is a town about halfway down to London, just another junction on the M1.