I’m so exhausted in every possible sense of the term – physically, emotionally, mentally. I feel like everything in my body has been drained out of me in the last month and a half. I realized exactly how strained I was when I was feeling faint and weak during Bikram yoga today. I’ve never felt that way during class, even the first time. When I left, I felt like the loser who didn’t give her all during class, but I knew that if I tried to exert myself more, I might have actually blacked out.

When I am by myself or walking, I think about Ed and how I couldn’t do more for him. I think about what he could have felt during his last moments. I think about how lonely he must have felt. And when I am on the phone with my mother sometimes, which has been pretty often since this awful thing happened, I feel frustrated, angry, and even more cynical. It’s as though she is unknowingly trying to imbue me with more cynicism in my life by constantly telling me all the time that no one really cares about me other than my parents; everyone who showed up at Ed’s service didn’t really care. No one cares except your parents. Apparently if I died today, no one would truly mourn me.

That’s a really sad, miserable thing to believe – that no one really cares about you. Yes, the way a parent mourns the loss of a child is different from the way a sibling or a best friend or a spouse mourns, but that’s not to say that there is absolutely no sense of loss or caring; it’s just different.

I guess I have two battles that I am really fighting now – I’m still fighting to accept that my brother is gone and will never come back to me. But I have faith that within time, I will fully accept this, though I will obviously never, ever forget or stop loving him. The second fight is the scarier fight – the fight for optimism, to overcome all the cynicism that this experience has fed into my life, as well as the cynicism that my own mother tries to fill me with. As awful as that sounds, it is a fight that will probably continue for the rest of my life. It’s not going to be easy, but it’s something I owe to myself, the love of my life, our future children… And to Ed. We all need optimism to be happy, fulfilled beings. I need to prove to Ed that all this is possible.