LINCOLN, Neb. ( Flatwater Free Press ) - John Anderson awoke in Oakland, California, to the sound of his youngest brother Aidan pounding on his door. Aidan had spent hours taking trains across the state to get to his apartment that morning, just days before Thanksgiving.

It’s Max, John’s brother told him. “You gotta take me to the airport.”

A day later, John was back in Omaha too, gathered with his family around the hospital bed of his middle brother Max.

He remembers Max as a 2-year-old flying through the kitchen on rollerblades. Max was a fitting name for him, John said, because he always did everything “to the maximum.” Now he lay uncharacteristically still, his body kept alive by machines.

“I had no concept, not even a figment of a possibility of reality, that something like this

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