There are a lot of things you think when telling someone goodbye, but typically, none of those thoughts include gruesome predictions of their death.
It was July. I was fourteen, enamored with my seventeen-year-old cousin, Ezra, who was sweet and goofy and athletic and passionate. I can’t remember saying goodbye, but I remember thinking, Oh, I’ll see him again soon. I’d hugged him quickly, then left him with his sister. I’d expected to see him again later, but I ended up spending the whole day with my sister, and then we hurried to the car because my dog had been left there for too long, and though we’d left the windows cranked (though not wide enough for her to escape), she was probably hot and scared. So it was concerns for my dog and not my cousin I felt when I left the camp on that sweltering day in July.
Then Ezra went off to Israel for his gap year in August. He turned eighteen in October. And he got shot in the head in November.
I remember the chaos. The crying. The not knowing, and then wishing I still didn’t know when I did. My mom holding my hand and telling me he died. The way that I felt disconnected in that moment. His mother wailing, “My baby.” A thousand people in a room, somber, silent, with a coffin in front. Five hundred more people outside, because they didn’t fit. A shuffling walk to a cemetery. A coffin being…
