Today was one of those gloomy, grey days where it threatened to rain but didn’t. The temperatures were noticeably cooler, and the air felt a bit drier. I somehow managed to wake up for the gym at 6am despite not sleeping very well the night before. Maybe my body really can’t adjust to a three-hour time difference as easily as it has in my younger years with sleep.

Grey days are always the worst for me when I start contemplating random thoughts during everything from workout classes to browsing on the internet to just walking across the street. My thoughts always tend to drift toward Ed and all the things that went wrong for him in his life… mostly around our parents, our wider family, and all the bullying he endured as a child growing up.

Today, they circled around the fact that he wasn’t able to see our cousin’s first-born child when she was born at the hospital because of some stupid fight over a phone bill that was just $30 over the usual that my dad picked with Ed unfairly (it was my fault for not realizing that dialing a 650 area code from a 415 land line is considered “long distance; they changed the rules since the last time I did this). So our mother wouldn’t let him go in the car with them as they drive to Redwood City. The second thing I thought about today was how he didn’t get to attend our other cousin’s wedding or reception in San Jose in 2011 because our mother said he would embarrass and shame her and my dad, and she yelled, “Why would you take off work for this? It’s not that important!” I couldn’t attend because I was across the country and just came back from an expensive Europe trip, but I insisted to him then that he go… and he relented and did not.

I think it was that summer when I fully realized that my mother’s way of rationalizing things was only getting worse and worse, and it was that summer when she began making loud, public scenes, yelling at both of us in front of crowds of people. It was like the beginning of the end.

There are too many things he was deprived of that I’ll always be angry about. The list goes on forever.

I spent a bit of time on Lover.ly and theknot.com today reading about wedding planning, potential bridesmaids dresses that my friends won’t hate, and gathering ideas for everything from place settings, favors, bouquets, food station examples, and hairstyles. I came across an article about how to word invitations and important pieces of stationery when there is a significant loved one who is unable to be at the wedding either due to distance, health, or death. There won’t be any wedding program with the words “Brother of the Bride: Edward Wong.” I suppose I could word it as “Brother of the Bride: the late Edward Wong.” That sounds horrible. Or I could do what my cousins have done with their late father and dedicate the ceremony to my brother. I’m not sure, but I want him to be known there that day.

Ed’s inability to be there on this day will always be front of mind as the planning begins, progresses, and comes to a close. I want to find a way to make sure that everyone at that wedding, whoever decides to come, that is, knows how important he is to me despite the fact that he’s physically gone from my world. Maybe we could create a cake topper with Bart on it. Or maybe we could make sure that we have a mini slideshow just dedicated to him and me.

I miss my brother.

For the first time in over six years of flying between New York and San Francisco, I did not fly direct between the two cities coming back to New York tonight. I actually had a layover in Dallas, much to my utter annoyance. The price difference, if I can remember it correctly, was over $100, which didn’t make sense considering that this flight was already fairly expensive for this time of year. I’ve never paid more than $500 to fly home except for one time when it was around Christmas, which is to be expected.

My mom was pretty miserable this morning when we left. She’s always sad the day I leave, and more so this time since yesterday, she was thinking about Ed even more than usual because of the egg rolls we made together. It’s always a hard thing for me to see my mother sad. I feel like she’s tried so hard her whole life to do good things and be a good person, to work hard and support her family, yet at the end of the day, she’s never gotten what she’s really deserved and just isn’t happy. She’s happier when I am around because it means that she can do new, different things, and she can have someone near her who genuinely cares about her and doesn’t just want to talk about the latest shooting or crime that’s happened in the neighborhood.

The older I get, the more I realize how incapable I am of so many things. I can’t make my mom less nervous or paranoid. I can’t make my dad less negative and focused on his delusion of increasing crime and a terrible world of idiots. I can’t make either of them more open to doing “rich people” things like international travel and fine dining. No matter what I do, I can’t make my parents happy people. No child really can.

When we were growing up, it was always a highlight when Ed and I found out that our mother was making her famous egg rolls. The Vietnamese style egg rolls she’d make were a huge family favorite. All of my cousins would just sit there and gorge on them, dunking them into the homemade nuoc mam my mom would prepare and chomping away. It was usually either Ed’s or my job to grate the carrots for the egg roll mixture, and sometimes, we’d even have arguments about who should do it because neither of us enjoyed the task. Occasionally we would help roll them, but she always found our rolling skills sub par and demoted us to just peeling apart the egg roll skins and carrot grating. They are so well remembered and loved that my cousin in San Jose tried to replicate them recently, but he cheapened his version and omitted the shrimp.

This visit, my mom said she wanted Chris to try her egg rolls, so we spent this afternoon rolling them after a night of marinading the filling. As we filled and rolled, my mom reminisced on how excited Ed would get every time he’d see peeled carrots and the hand grater sitting in a big bowl in the kitchen. “Are you making egg rolls?” he’d ask, as his eyes would widen with anticipation. I could tell she felt empty as she remembered this. “This is the first time we’re making egg rolls and Ed isn’t here,” she said softly. I didn’t have anything to say to that. There was nothing left to say.

When Chris came back to the house today, we drove over to the Columbarium for Chris to visit Ed and for me to see him one last time before I leave home tomorrow. My mom immediately burst into tears as she walked up to Ed’s niche. I knew the egg rolls were the trigger. “Ed can’t eat any egg rolls,” my mom sobbed as I tried to comfort her. “He loves them.”

It made me feel a little sick to remember how much he loved them and how he couldn’t have any this time. Ed will never eat any of our mother’s homemade egg rolls ever again. And the rare times when our mother will make them, it will always remind her of how Ed can’t enjoy them with us anymore. And being a fragile soul, she’ll always cry thinking about it. As much as I don’t want to think about it, maybe it’s better that she not make them again.

As much as I am happy knowing he’s no longer suffering, it still hurts every day knowing that he can’t even enjoy doing these little simple things with us. It hurts even more being in this house and in this city we grew up in together. Every day this trip has been a constant reminder of his death and absence in our life. His innocence is constantly on my mind when I am home, as is his obsession with all things bedding related, his child-like interest in the Simpsons and Curious George and the Smurfs and everything else we used to watch on TV as kids, and his love of fried food and meat and his dislike of green vegetables. My sweet Ed deserved more from this life but never got it. The world just feels like a harsh place.

My dad and his younger brother do not get along. Actually, my dad doesn’t get along with either his living brother or sister; in fact, I just found out that my uncle and aunt, despite “getting along,” haven’t even seen each other since the day of Ed’s funeral. That was over a year and a month ago. My aunt claims she is just “too busy,” and my uncle says he has tried a couple of times without any reciprocation of desire from my aunt, so he’s thrown in the towel.

We had dinner altogether tonight, but without my aunt, and Chris joined, as well as my mom’s best friend and her husband, and another JW friend. My dad and uncle barely said hello or goodbye to each other. My mom’s best friend was visibly shocked when I said that my uncle was my dad’s younger brother. Yes, she wouldn’t have realized they were siblings since they wouldn’t speak a word to each other. It’s amazing that every time my uncle sees my face that he isn’t reminded of their mutual animosity against each other.

It’s been sunny skies and warm temperatures from the beginning of Ben’s visit here in San Francisco until the very end. He’s really lucked out with the weather. It’s been an enjoyable time taking him around and acting like a tourist again in my own city, but honestly since I’ve come back, I’ve felt a little stale. This city is a constant reminder of my brother, and while that is sometimes a good thing, at the end of the day, it is more depressing than anything because of the fact that he’s dead and the way he had to die. Whenever I come home, there’s a void. He’s not at his desk or in the bedroom we once shared. He won’t be coming home from work or karate and throwing his bag through the door as he unties his shoes outside before entering the way he used to.

But when I am not staying at home, like tonight and tomorrow since I’ll be at Chris’s hotel for work, it’s like I am escaping my reality and sad past that somehow seeps its way into my present every time I return home.