My brother, Mikey, died on a beautiful day. The temperature was eighty degrees. He had borrowed his friend’s raft. It was a delicious spring morning, perfectly suited to floating between waves in Lake Michigan and delighting in being alive. Mikey was wearing a life jacket at the time. He had been careful. He wanted to live. But he was not an experienced boatman.

The winds gusted to fifty miles per hour. The raft, unstable amidst the turmoil, capsized. The water temperature was thirty degrees – below freezing.

Ah, deceptive, deceptive winter day … for it still was winter. When Mikey hit the water, his heart stopped and he died.

Just like that.

Every morning for two weeks, my father attended sunrise services at Beth El Temple to say kaddish for my brother Michael. Kaddish is a prayer for the dead. It is also said every year on the anniversary of the loved one’s death.

I went with my father and mother to each one of these services, and I saw the faces of the regulars who could be counted on to form a minyan. The old Europeans … the miscellaneous middle-aged businessmen … the few committed youths. I had seen each of them at other sunrise services, always chatty, friendly, filled with gossip and good will, with maybe a few amiable complaints thrown in here and there just to keep their blood flowing.