We spent our New Year’s Eve evening at the Aqua rooftop bar in Kowloon, and then back at our hotel icing my ribs. We wanted to watch the fireworks along the harbor, but because my ribs kept flaring up consistently between 9-10pm every night, this made that desire virtually impossible… unless I wanted to be in a lot of physical pain in the midst of the huge crowds that lined the Tsim Sha Tsui waterfront. It’s okay. We didn’t really come to Hong Kong just for New Year’s Eve and to see its fireworks; we came because we wanted to see, experience, and eat Hong Kong. However, I will always remember 2015 as the year that ended with my contracting and recovering from whooping cough, a disease I never thought in a million years I was even capable of getting. It’s like my body had time traveled back into the past, contracted the disease, and dropped me back off in December 2015, leaving me feeling confused.

A lot has happened in the last year, and it’s scary to think that yet another full year has passed since my Ed has left this world. In 2015, Chris turned 34, the age that Ed was just a month shy of turning. It’s another thing I thought about on Christmas day this year — my future husband is now the age that Ed never got to be. It’s weird to think of it that way — how did Chris become older than Ed?! In some ways, Ed should be 36 now, but because he died, he’s kind of eternally 33 going on 34, even if in mind, he was more like a child of 10 or 12. While hearing about the family members and friends coming from Chris’s side, I thought about Ed not being at our wedding. When we take “immediate family” photos, on my side, it will just be my parents and me. Ed won’t be there. It’s just the three of us now. It has been just the three of us since July 22, 2013, at around 4:50pm PT. It is a sad thought, but one that lingers in the back of my mind. Twenty sixteen is our wedding year, our wedding year without my Ed. In some ways, I am dreading it because of that, which is a negative thought, but you can’t really ignore what is so painfully obvious.