I had a dream that I had to fly home for an emergency. My mother called to let me know that Ed was acting suicidal, and that he needed me to be there as soon as possible. I flew home, and on an Uber ride back to my parents’ house, I called my mom. She’s out buying food near the house, so she isn’t home with him. I went ballistic on her. “How can you leave him alone? If he’s suicidal, you cannot leave him alone by himself!” My mom gets defensive and said she had errands to run and can’t just sit with him all day. “If he gets very suicidal, then he can always call 911!” That’s probably the stupidest thing to say given the circumstances, but then again, it’s not like much of what she says in these situations tends to make sense. I got off the phone with her as the driver parks in front of the house.

My mom was walking up the hill at the same time, so we entered the house together. I immediately called out Ed’s name, but no response. I ran around to each room to look for him, and I finally reached his bedroom, where I noticed his arm sticking out from under his bed, and I screamed. I pushed the bed aside to reveal him lying with his arms and legs sprawled out, not breathing, his eyes closed. On the night table next to him is a glass of orange juice with a bottle of rat poisoning next to it. Based on the  looks of things, he had mixed the rat poisoning into his orange juice and downed it. I touched his chest to feel for a heart beat and touched his arms, and all I felt was cold as I tried to resuscitate him and yelled for our mom to call 911. But I knew it was too late.

As with the still missing Malaysia Airlines plane last year, the Germanwings plane crash was a devastation also is difficult to understand, especially given that we now know the pilot who crashed the plane suffered from depression, was suicidal, and purposely crashed the plane. Every time I see a headline about it or an article, my eyes have watered this week to think of all the innocent lives that had to die because of one man’s suffering. We can’t fully blame him because of his suffering and disease…. But can we?

I look back on my brother’s death quite often, and I think about all the ways he might have thought about killing himself that would have been “easy.” A self-inflicted gun shot wound if he could get a hold of a gun was one of them. Jumping off a bridge was another, and sadly the way he chose to go. Walking into oncoming traffic? Yes, that would be easy, but that would adversely affect the lives of the driver and whoever else was in the car. Ed was so painfully cognizant of his own pain and how it could affect other people. I’m assuming that this pilot was so blinded by his pain that he couldn’t see this the way Ed did. One of the things Ed said during a meltdown he had with my mom the year he died was, “One day, I will disappear. You won’t know where I’ve gone, so don’t come looking for me.”

I still get choked up remembering my mother telling me this after the fact.

At my friend’s birthday event last night, I met a guy who I would definitely label a creeper. I realize that sounds really judgmental, but I couldn’t help it. As soon as he introduced himself and made eye contact with me, I felt uncomfortable. He stood too close to me, got his face too close to my face, and tried to bond over the fact that we both have roots in Vietnam. To make sure he knew that I wasn’t available or interested, I started talking with another of my friend’s friends about my fiance and our upcoming trip to Japan, where this friend is originally from. This creeper suddenly became super belligerent and started interrupting our conversation to talk about completely irrelevant topics just for the sake of inserting himself rudely into our conversation. It eventually became so unbearable that I looked at my time and decided it was late enough to leave and not look like I was ditching my friend. So I left.

On my short walk home, I started thinking about how people get labeled “creepy” or “shady,” and I realize that I couldn’t really pinpoint an exact quality or trait. They tend to seem like ordinary guys at first glance, but there’s a certain unsettling vibe that these guys always tend to send to those around them. I kind of feel bad for them, but at the same time, I wonder if they even realize they are being creepy.