What It’s Like to Lose Someone in a Terrorist Attack

I look at my phone and it flashes the date. October 1. My cousin Ezra would be turning 22 today.

If he were still alive.

It hits me, then. Four years ago, my cousin, Ezra Schwartz, was celebrating his eighteenth birthday. A month and a half later, he was dead.

It was my first experience with death. I was fourteen and in my first year of high school. Trying to grow into my personality, pursue my passions, be a teenager. Then someone shot my cousin in the face.