I whispered to Dad during Rosh Hashanah services, "Do you believe in God?" "Not really," he said. "No." "Then why do we come here?" He sucked thoughfully on his Tums tablet and put his arm around me, draping me under his musty woolen prayer shawl, and then shrugged. "I've been wrong before," he said. And that pretty much summed up what theology there was to find in the Foxman home.

Sometimes it’s heartbreaking to see your siblings as the people they’ve become. Maybe that’s why we all stay away from each other as a matter of course.

We are injured and angry, scared and sad. Some families, like some couples, become toxic to each other after prolonged exposure.

It's hard to imagine her ever having felt lost, but it's impossible to know the people your parents were before they were your parents.

I wake up like this, this sense that I've somehow been transported to an alternate universe where my life took a left instead of a right beacuse of some seeemingly insignificant yet cosmically crucial choice I've made, about a girl or a kiss or a date or a job or which Starbucks I went into...something.

We are all smiling in the picture, three brothers having a grand old time just playing around in the living room, no agendas, no buried resentments or permanent scars. Even under the best of circumstances, there's just something so damn tragic about growing up.

She was smart and funny and vulnerable and just so goddamned beautiful, the kind of beautiful that was worth being shot down over.