My one week has passed in San Francisco, and I’m back to New York today. Time really flew by quickly, and I feel like I really didn’t do that much.

In March of last year when I came home for two weeks and flew back to New York, I felt miserable. I was scared about my brother’s future and how he was going to cope with his problems and life overall, I was scared about my mom’s health and the stress she felt around my brother, and I was scared about my family in general being in such a sad, negative place and seeming to be unable to get out of it. Now, a year later, Ed is gone, and each of my parents is struggling to cope in his and her own way. The stress of worrying about my brother’s future is gone because he is gone, but now there’s a different type of stress that looms – thinking about my mother’s ability to cope without him and retain her health, and my dad’s ability to stay healthy and not be so negative and irritable. When we become negative and saddened, we are at more risk to fall ill.

My biggest fear used to be that I’d lose my brother in the way that I did. Now, it’s that I could lose my parents because of how weak and vulnerable they are, especially my mom. And then I think about the same things I used to think about with Ed – how I’d cope knowing he wouldn’t be here the rest of my life to see big potential events happen for me – engagement, marriage, pregnancy, children, buying homes. I think about that now in the context of my parents, and I’m scared. I don’t sit here and obsess about it, but it’s a fear in the back of my mind that they won’t be here when any of those things happen. I don’t have a schedule for any of those things, and none of those thing seem very close to happening. Sometimes, it’s like you are waiting for something to happen, but you have no idea what will happen and when. That really sucks.