Leadership, continued from page 3
accident, Jessica writes, she and her brother Alex
were inseparable. But after the accident, Alex grew
more distant and aloof.
Jessica remembers on the way to Jonathan’s funeral,
her parents telling Alex “what had happened was
God’s will, that this was part of a much bigger plan.”
After the funeral while Alex slept, her parents told
Jessica “that maybe it was better if we didn’t bring
it up again.” So, the accident was never mentioned
again in the family. “When I heard Alex crying in his
room at night,” Jessica writes, “I stayed where I was,
wrapped in my comforter, and I didn’t bring it up.”
For years, the accident wasn’t brought up. Though
he had been on the honor roll and was a very bright
student, Alex dropped out of college at 19 and no-
body brought up the accident. “At 23, when he was
first arrested on charges of driving under the influ-
ence,” Jessica writes, “and at 24, when he went to jail
for reckless driving, and at 25, 26, 27, when he was
getting high in the morning and drunk at night, I
never brought it up.”
As she watched her brother’s decline before her
eyes, she tried tough love by yelling at him but
she never brought up the accident. In those rare
times when he got a job and she tried to affirm
him, she never brought it up. When nothing she
and her parents did to help Alex worked, they
still didn’t bring it up.
“Until one night, when we were 30 and 31,” Jessica
writes, “and I offhandedly (and uncomfortably)
asked over dinner if he ever thought about the day
Jonathan died.
“Oh, now you want to talk about that?” he shot
back with a laugh. Jessica said at that moment she
felt her brother’s “fury over our silence.” She tried
to make small talk but the wound of silence was too
large. They each went their separate ways that night
“and let the silence continue to grow.”
But the desire to reconnect with her brother moti-
vated Jessica to try to find out everything about the
accident and what Alex saw that day Jonathan died.
She searched online archives of their hometown
newspaper, tracked down the police report, and flew
4 • The New Wine Press • May 2017
to Florida (where the family lived when the accident
happened) to read it in person since they police
would not mail her a copy. And finally, after all the
years of silence, she read her brother’s account of the
accident scrawled in “my brother’s sloppy teenage
script, his signature underneath his witness state-
ment.” She could almost hear her brother’s voice as
she read the police report: “Traffic was speeding up,
there wasn’t enough time. I reached the sidewalk
first and when I turned around, Jonathan was still in
the middle of the road. I saw him get hit. When the
ambulance came, I had to go across the street and tell
his mother.”
Jessica wrote down the name of the driver and
found his phone number. She called him, told him
who she was and that she wanted to know about an
accident he was involved in back in 1999. The man
on the other end of the line said to her, “That choice
was the hardest I ever made in my life.” He told
Jessica that by the time he saw both boys in the road,
he was already too close. “If he swerved onto the
sidewalk, he would hit Alex; if he didn’t, he would
hit Jonathan.”
For three hours, the driver spoke about his memo-
ry, his pain, and how his life changed at that moment
of the accident. She told him that she “wanted to find
a way to take away my brother’s pain.”
“You can’t,” he said. “But if you want to lessen it,
you’ve got to listen.”
Jessica didn’t stop with the man who hit Jonathan.
She tracked down the witnesses who testified in court,
the paramedics and emergency room doctors who
tried to save Jonathan, and the nurse who sat with
Jonathan’s mother at the hospital. “The more I heard,”
she said, “the more Alex’s story became defanged.”
It took more than a year of research and tracking
down all the people who were somehow connected to
what happened to Alex and Jonathan that day. Then
she called Alex and told him “about the people I had
spoken to and what they had said, and his instinct
was to confirm and correct each detail. That was my
opening, and his. Later I was able to ask what no one
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