I took a red eye flight back to New York and arrived just past 7am this morning. I was bleary eyed, even after sleeping flat in business class for just over four hours. Four hours is not enough sleep for anyone. Who knew that I’d then be having a discussion on racism and gun control with my cab driver.

When I got into my cab to head back to the apartment, I made eye contact with my cab driver and realized he was not the usual Indian or Bangladeshi driver. After some small talk, I found out that he is actually Tibetan and had been living in this country for just over 15 years. He said he’s been married almost 15 years and wants to either go back to Southern India where there’s a large Tibetan community, or Tibet, where he’s from and where his family still lives. “I don’t feel safe in this country as a man,” he said, briefly mentioning the Charleston church shooting that has been all over the news in the last couple of days. “I don’t feel comfortable raising children here, especially boys. How can I feel comfortable knowing any random person can just get a gun, shoot, and kill me and my future son here?”

I felt so hurt hearing this. I realize that what he says sounds a bit paranoid, but given recent events, is it really that far fetched? Society is supposed to progress and get better as time goes on in an ideal world, and it seems like racism continues to persist. America, the land of plenty and opportunity, is disappointing immigrants and locals alike. What we praise as a melting pot that embraces all cultures, at this moment in time, just feels like a big sham, like a facade that we have to hold up to try to brag to the rest of the world that we’re the best (even when we clearly are not), to entice people to come into our country, and then be bombarded by arduous, senseless visa and immigration issues, a lack of gun control, and perpetual white supremacy that says that as long as you are not a white person in our society, you will never attain success as easily. You’ll always be seen as a black person or a Tibetan person or a yellow person. That’s what you are first and foremost.

I watched Jon Stewart’s clip on the Charleston shootings, and it resonated with me because that’s exactly how I feel. We will look at this incident of church goers being shot and killed during prayer as a tragedy, as a hate crime, but zilch will come of it because of politics, as Obama says. Nothing will change — at least, not in the near future. You and I may want change, but we have lots of neighbors who refuse to admit that guns are a problem here, that racism still persists, and turn a blind eye to all these deaths as long as their own loved ones are untouched by these terrors.

As a country, we’re so f*cked up.

In the last couple of weeks, I’ve been thinking a lot about Ed. About two years ago to this day, Ed did a hike with some church friends and apparently outpaced all of them reaching the peak. He powered through it and didn’t take any breaks. He never told me about the hike, but I heard that he went through our dad, who told me afterwards.

Why didn’t he ever tell me about these things when I asked him? I wondered. Every time I’d call him, I’d ask him what he’d been up to lately, and his answer was always the same: “Nothing.” It was like pulling teeth for him to talk to me on the phone. I’ll be honest: as much as I love my brother, he was always one of the worst people to speak with over the phone. He’s impossible to read when you are talking to him that way, and he hates the telephone. He never enjoyed answering the phone and preferred to let all calls go straight to the answering machine. It used to drive me crazy, and I would always get so exasperated. I know he would have been more honest and open with me about his activities if I had been there in person.

I remember the photo that his church friend shared from that hike via e-mail after I requested pictures. Everyone in the photo is smiling at the camera except him. His face stares into the camera, lonely, a little sad, distant from the world in many ways. I can’t even bring myself to look at it now because I know how upset I will be if I do. I look back at the time when he was alive, and I can’t help but think that there were too many things that were left unsaid, or perhaps not said enough, or emphasized enough, and now it’s too late. It’s been almost two years since he’s passed, and I still think about these things. It’s not so much my own pain that lingers as strongly, but more the pain he felt that seems to stay with me, maybe because I never fully had the capacity to understand it, and also because of the helplessness of his pain. It’s as though the pain was so deep that even God couldn’t help him at that point, and Ed just let go.

I had a very vivid dream last night. I was back home in San Francisco, and I’m in my dad’s car with my parents as my dad is driving up the hill. As we reach the top, I see Ed and my cousin standing there, seemingly in an argument. As I look closer, I realize that Ed has a gun in his hand as he waves it around, and I hear their argument: my cousin is trying to convince Ed not to shoot himself. Ed wants to end his life. I start yelling at my dad to stop the car, but he refuses. “He’s going to do what he wants, so just let him do it,” my dad says. “He never listens to anything we say, so what difference will it make?” I scream at him and tell him that’s not the point; we need to help him because he needs us now, at this very second. We keep arguing and screaming at each other, and I threaten to jump out of the moving vehicle if he does not pull over. When he finally stops the car, I run out and get to the top of the block to see that Ed has already shot himself in the head. Blood is everywhere surrounding his skull, and my cousin is lying over him, screaming and crying for Ed’s life. Our mom runs over and is wailing, and our dad stands there stoically and says nothing.

It’s like a reminder to me that Ed is never coming back, and my parents will always be who they are, as frustrating and painful as it is for me.

It’s pretty clear that I lucked out in the parents-in-law area. My in-laws are smart, generally open-minded people who are world travelers that would put most of us to shame. They’ve welcomed me into their lives with open arms and without any real hesitation. But I knew that at some point, we’d disagree on something. I guess that some point has come now.

None of these things are big things. They are quite small in the grand scheme of problems we could have. My future mum-in-law has indicated that while she enjoyed the sample wedding album that we shared with her from our chosen wedding photographer, she didn’t find them particularly unique and was expecting something different. I get that not everyone understands photography technique and editing the way I might since I scrutinize photos like crazy and took a while to make my photographer decision, but wedding photos are wedding photos. No matter how personalized and “you” that you make your wedding, you will definitely have photos that look like other people’s wedding photos: the bride walking down the aisle, the bride and groom standing together and posing, family shots, cake cutting, dancing, etc. You can’t really make these things that different. It’s just the way it is. The editing will make the difference in the end in terms of color.

She’s also indicated that she is against the idea of us having a nanny. “You have to raise your own kids!” she exclaimed at Chris when Chris mentioned that we would eventually have a nanny. I didn’t get involved in the conversation, but I was definitely not that comfortable listening to it. The thing about being in a dual-income family is that if both partners are working full-time, you can’t really get by having children and not have some external help, whether it’s from family, an extremely good friend, or professional help through a daycare or a nanny. It’s just not feasible. I have no desire to be a stay-at-home mother and wife. Chris’s parents had the luxury of having Chris’s dad’s parents take care of the kids while his own parents worked full time. My parents had the luxury of having my grandmother live with us while all of us were growing up. They had help — it was just unpaid and done by family. If we’re not living in San Francisco or Melbourne when we raise our children, we’re not going to have familial help, either, so the only option is hired help. People seem to forget the little luxuries they’ve had when they judge other people’s choices, which is a little frustrating.

Usually, when you hear of bridesmaid drama, it tends to involve the bride being too high maintenance and demanding, also known as a “bridezilla,” and the bridesmaids not being a huge fan of this and expressing frustration. In this version of bridesmaid drama, it’s the bridesmaids being passive aggressive with each other to the point where absolutely nothing is getting done.

My friend just found a great place where we were supposed to stay for our weekend away in September, and we all loved it. Supposedly, another bridesmaid never confirmed that she was in agreement with the place and the price, so of course, given that it’s Labor Day weekend, the place got booked on AirBnB by someone else. It’s gone now. And I was really frustrated. How difficult could it possibly be to respond in a timely manner to an email about a time-sensitive booking?

One bridesmaid is too passive aggressive and doesn’t stand up for herself enough and getting stuff done. The other is lackadaisical and doesn’t see a reason for setting timelines and deadlines. In other words, no one is being proactive to get anything done.

I’ve explicitly told them all that I want to hear no more complaining about each other and nothing about planning until everything is finalized, and I can finally hear some good news for once. I don’t think I should have to be involved in all this when this is their responsibility.

Tonight, we went to see a show in the West Village called “Nice Girl,” about a woman who ends up dropping out of Radcliffe College after her dad falls ill and dies, and she lives with her mother for the next 16 years and helps take care of her. She takes an assistant-type job at an accounting firm, and it’s clear she thought she had more potential than to be someone’s assistant at the age of 38.

The mom is emotionally manipulative. She tries to get her daughter to do things by guilt-tripping her here and there, and she loves to act helpless, as though she would not be able to survive without her daughter’s daily help. She gets angry at the idea that her daughter would even think of moving out and being on her own. Wow, this seemed so familiar to me. It’s like my own mother in a lot of ways. She always says she’d never be able to live alone, ever.

It made me remember the one time when Ed had a tiny chance of moving out. He found a small room for rent in an in-law of someone’s house at an affordable price, and he considered moving. It would have given him freedom not just from the overbearing eyes of our parents, but also freedom from constant scrutiny and intense and unwarranted criticism, which chipped away at him every single day. Unfortunately, when my mom brought it up with me one day on the phone, she was angry about it. She said it was a stupid idea, that he’d never survive living on his own, and that his job wasn’t good enough for him to move out. She also said that if he did decide to move, he wouldn’t be allowed to take anything from this house with him except the bed he slept in. That infuriated me, and I told her it was wrong. My words meant nothing to her, though, and of course, she just yelled back.

Well, now the house has all these nice things that Ed was so generous and loving to buy — endless bath towels, bedsheets, pillows, comforters, a fancy knife set that is barely used, dishes, plates, bowls, bathroom supplies, even a freaking flat screen TV. That bed is still there, too. But there is no Ed. That house will never see Ed ever again.

We were shocked to learn of the economist John Nash’s death over the weekend during our trip to Ohio and Kentucky. I first learned of Nash during one of my economics courses in high school, then again during college, and of course, when the movie A Beautiful Mind came out during my high school days. When I learned of Nash’s genius and how he suffered from schizophrenia, I had thought about my brother then and thought that it was possible my brother did have a future. John Nash could get through it and persevere, therefore so could my brother! At the time, Ed was not exhibiting any schizophrenic symptoms, but he did have some of these symptoms toward the end of his life. They had mental illness in common.

The most tragic part of Nash’s and his wife’s deaths was that from what the reports have stated, they could still be alive today if they were just wearing seat belts in the cab they took from the airport. It made me shudder to read about the seat belt detail in the articles, as I thought back to a small handful of times when I’ve been in a New York City cab, and for some reason, the seat belt fastener either was not there or not working. I’ve been pretty diligent since I was young about always wearing a seat belt. It was drilled into my head by both of my parents (to this day, my mother still asks when I am in the car, “Did you buckle your seat belt?”), and then again during my mandatory driver training course in high school, where we had to watch test crash videos of dummies in car crashes wearing versus not wearing seat belts. Like when Dave Goldberg died earlier this month and I thought about him falling off his treadmill every time I got onto a gym treadmill in the weeks following, when I think about being in a car now, I think about seat belts, as I did tonight during our car ride home from LaGuardia.

My mom wants me to be a good wife and daughter-in-law. She knows that Chris’s parents are in town this week, so yesterday when I talked to her, she asked what I was making them for breakfast every morning. That’s a code for, she expects me to be preparing something for them to eat each morning to fulfill my good daughter-in-law duties.

This morning, I read this Vice article written by a woman whose best friend is suicidal. It was interesting to see another person’s perspective of interacting with someone with a severe mental illness and how she was coping with it. If I had to write an article like this about Ed, I’m not even sure where I’d begin. Would I begin it with his first suicide attempt when I was 11? Would I isolate it to his downward spiral from 2012 to 2013 when he started exhibiting schizoaffective disorder, and how I knew he was nearing his end, so I kept telling him I loved him and cared about him and that I needed him to be strong and believe in himself because I believed in him in every single phone conversation and e-mail up until that dreaded day he went missing? I don’t know.

What’s it like to be friends with someone who is suicidal, or to have a sibling who is suicidal and then commits suicide? I know what that’s like. No one really cares about your experience as the friend or the sibling. They just tell you that everyone has to carry their own load, that he has to figure things out for himself and stop leaning on you. No one wants to help you. They think you are pathetic for wanting to help. And they certainly don’t want to help him. So you are powerless, and you feel even more powerless as the days go on because you can tell the end is near. They think he’s crazy or not worth the time or effort, or they criticize him and make him seem that all his failures are his own fault… That is, until they receive the news that he is no longer living, that he is dead, and that he is dead by his own choice, or hand, or jump. Then they come back to you and say senseless, moronic things like, “If only I had known it was this serious, then…” Then what? Then you wouldn’t have done shit. You wouldn’t have done a single thing differently. Go ahead and cry your stupid tears. I don’t care that you are crying. You will cry at the funeral, feel bad for the next few days, at most a few weeks, and then move on with your life. The past has then passed, and you have forgotten. It’s easy for an outsider.

It’s really hard to have faith in human beings when you know how stupid they can be in times like this. How do you teach empathy to people who are just not open to it?

We ended our long day trip out to Long Island today with a stop at Tangra Masala, one of my all-time favorite restaurants that specializes in Indian Chinese food in my old neighborhood in Queens, Elmhurst. As we are ordering and eating, I am remembering how I wanted to take Ed to eat here when he came to New York, but there was no way that my mom or dad would have been able to eat it. My mom would have been annoyed it was Indian anything, and my dad would have passed out from how hot and spicy the food was. So in the end, I never got to take him. Ed loved hot and spicy food. He and I both got our mother’s pretty considerable heat tolerance. He also loved Indian food, but as a family we never ate it together unless it was just the two of us.

I thought a lot this evening about Ed and all the things he never had a chance to do, things he was pretty much robbed of because of our parents and how they prevented him from evolving and growing into a true adult. Something as basic as eating at this restaurant, or as frustrating as not being allowed to go to a cousin’s wedding because he would, in their opinion, shame the family, or as terrible as not being allowed to drive the family car into his thirties — the stories just get more and more ludicrous as I remember them and write them all down. Some of these things have been forced on me as well — I rarely got to drive despite being licensed to drive. My mom praised other people my age for driving and being independent, yet she refused to give that opportunity to Ed or me. Without being aware of it, they just didn’t want us to become adults, even though they thought they did everything they could to make us into adults. “Just be an adult! Can’t you do that?!” My mom would scream at Ed a few times a year in his 20s and into his 30s. Most of the time, Ed never yelled back. He knew he was powerless. Neither of them would ever empower or imbue him with the confidence and self-respect he needed to have a fair chance at life. My life at home is full of painful memories, all of which end in Ed’s premature and untimely and unfair death. These memories always seem to creep into my head at the most random times.