I called my mom today after I got off work, and I could tell she was on edge because she kept asking me the same questions twice minutes after asking them the first time. I asked her what she was doing, and she said that she and my dad were getting ready to go visit Ed at the Columbarium. Since they weren’t here on the 22nd, they had planned to come see him after they came back from Monterey.

On the train ride home later tonight, I suddenly felt really solemn when I thought about all those times that Ed hated spending time alone with my parents, and all those calls he would make to me when both of them were not home to rant to me, or that brief period when he had a mobile phone, and he’d use it to call me to complain about them. As much as I love my parents, they always see the glass half empty and look for the worst in every person and every situation; it’s just the way they are, and I’m sure it has been shaped by life circumstances they have faced as well as bad experiences with others they’ve had. Ed knew this, and he couldn’t stand it. Even in their calmest moments together, Ed was always tense and uneasy; he never felt fully comfortable and was always scared of the next second when our dad would criticize him for doing something “stupid” or our mom would snap at him for something else nit-picky.

And when I thought about all this, I realized: the truth is that their calmest times together have been… now, when Ed is no longer of human form, and my parents go visit him on their own at the Neptune Columbarium. As depressing as that is, it is the reality of the situation. My dad can’t say anything to put him down, my mom is too overcome by her grief of losing him, now just over a year ago, that she can’t get mad about anything, and Ed… is just quiet and observes them observing him.

I don’t mean to be an offensive person, but sometimes it’s as though I have no choice but to say something that will piss someone else off. I spent most of my childhood being told that I had to be nice to everyone, smile and laugh, be charming, be agreeable, not stir things up. I’m sure the reason for this was a combination of my being a girl and being Asian, but either way, it’s not very conducive to making sure that people don’t think that you are a doormat, stupid, or have zero personality.

So I was on my way to dinner with some college friends, and I am telling one of these friends a conflict I am having. She immediately starts giving me advice, i.e. how to assimilate and be something I am not. She is dead serious. She is not even half joking. Anyone who knows me at all knows that I refuse to accept being a phony (and anyone who got anything out of Catcher in the Rye should know this, too), so I proceeded to tell her off. I told her that I am 28 years old working at a tech company, not in K-12 trying to “fit in” and struggling amidst cooties, boy trouble, and self esteem issues. If I can’t be myself now, when the hell am I ever going to be myself? If anyone has any desire to lead a meaningful life, s/he would not just walk around being a fake and doing things for the sake of doing them. At the end of my rant, she was obviously rendered completely speechless and just had this half stunned, half “you’re so evil” look on her face. So, I changed the subject.

Needless to say, I won’t be initiating any more outings with this person. In fact, I was reminded in this moment why I’d made no effort to contact her in the last five months since I saw her last.

Do I still get a grace period for feeling miserable that Ed is gone, or has that period already ended maybe six months ago? Or maybe the grace period recommences every year when we reach the anniversary of his passing. I don’t really know how people perceive these things.

I spent a lot of today wondering if anyone is actually thinking that it’s been almost a year since he decided to say “Peace out!” in his own way and leave us. I’m sure my parents are painfully cognizant of it. That would explain their sudden getaway trip as well as my mom’s voice being a lot softer and more gentle the last few days over the phone. Who remembers? Or really, who even cares? Who thinks about the fact that he died almost a year ago now? I wonder if any of his church friends ever think about him, or if my good-for-nothing cousins stop for a moment to contemplate his passing. Do they even remember the date? And then I get into an angry mood thinking about how embarrassing two of them were when they gave their version of a “eulogy” at my brother’s funeral, and I ask myself what made me more infuriated — that terrible, immature, shallow speech, or my third cousin’s rushed, mumbled, and non-enunciated recitation of 1 Corinthians 13 — all of this done within three feet of my brother’s dead body.

Maybe my friend was right. Maybe none of them should be invited to my wedding.

I was on the phone with my mom last night, and she tells me that she decided last week that she and my dad would drive down to Monterey early next week. They would leave on Monday morning and come back Wednesday evening. “Your dad works so hard that I told him that we should take a short trip and enjoy,” she said. My parents have been to Monterey more times than I can count (they like what they are used to), and I guess it is an improvement that they are going somewhere instead of just saying home all the time, but then it suddenly hits me today that the real reason that they are going away is because my mom doesn’t want to be at home when the anniversary of Ed’s passing comes on Tuesday. It took me over a day to realize this.

All those words still sound terrible to me and trigger tears and stomach knots in me: “Ed’s passing,” “Ed’s death,” “Ed’s gone,” “Ed’s not here anymore,” “the anniversary of Ed’s passing.” I don’t really want to face the reality that he’s been gone from my life for almost an entire year. Hell, when thinking about my bridal shower being in San Francisco, I still thought about it as though he was still living at home and still sleeping in the same room that we shared growing up. In many ways, his death is still not real to me, and maybe it will never really be fully real to me. I’ll never know for sure.

Today, we received news that another Malaysia Airlines airplane had crashed with almost 300 people over Ukraine. Initially, it wasn’t clear from the news reports what the cause of the crash was, but it was later revealed that a missile had hit the plane, causing it to go down. When I saw this news, I immediately got chills all over my body. Every time I hear about a tragedy of any sort now, I immediately remember the pain and shock I felt when Ed went missing, and we ultimately found out that he was gone forever.

On my way to dinner tonight, I was on the phone with my mom when she told me that she heard on the radio about the crash. She immediately got worried and said that she doesn’t want Chris and me traveling for leisure at all anymore because of the last two plane crashes that have happened. My mother is so predictable.

I had dinner tonight with a friend who is a former colleague, and although I’ve always known that she’s a pretty sensitive, fragile being, today I realized exactly how sensitive she is and how she tends to over-analyze and play scenes over and over in her head in an attempt to make sense of them. And I also learned that like me, mental illness seems to run in her family, as her mother battles with it along with some substance addictions, and a relative on her mom’s side committed suicide.

She said to me, I know how you feel and are probably scared of passing down that possible recessive gene to your kids; I was so scared of it that I decided a long time ago that I would never have kids.

It is a fear I have had in the back of my mind on and off. I thought about it a lot last year when Ed passed away and thought about my future children’s lives and how I would explain to them that they have an Uncle Ed, but he’s just not here anymore. I never want my children to suffer and go through what Ed had to go through. But I won’t let fear prevent me from attempting to be happy.

I met my aunt for lunch today near my office. She’s visiting for about 3.5 months and splitting her time between her friend’s house in New Jersey and her son’s apartment in Brooklyn.

My aunt has three sons – the oldest one calls her constantly, the middle one only calls her when he needs something (or is responding to her calls), and the last one complains to her as often as he can get his mother’s attention and expects her to drop her entire life to take care of his son — her grandson. She’s planning to visit her brother in the next two weeks in Boston since it’s only four hours away from here.

“It’s good to keep in contact and see family,” she said to me. That was probably an allusion to her middle child… And the fact that I told her that he doesn’t reach out to me at all, and when I send him and his wife e-mails, only his wife responds with him cc’ed. When I told her I contacted all of her sons to let them know about my engagement, she asked if he responded, and I said no. She had a “Well, I could have guessed that” look.

I come back from an incredible nine-day long vacation, the kind that if I had it my way, I’d never return home from, and somehow within an hour of starting work again (from home, though), a colleague decides to pick a massive fight with me and call me a lot of demeaning adjectives, making sure to use words like “always” and “this is standard for you all the time.” As you can imagine, I didn’t just sit there and take it like a punching bag, and I fought back. Needless to say, we got nowhere with the conversation and it ended with a massive lingering conflict.

It’s hard working in the industry that I am in – as a woman and as an Asian American. It’s a male-dominated, very white place (that is, my company), and people love to make sweeping assumptions about how you will act based on your background and your title. As an Asian woman, people assume, whether consciously or subconsciously, that I will just take orders and not question authority. Well, I wasn’t brought up to be a doormat, so that’s never really going to work for me. I will always say what I think whether people like it or not. If that’s something that gets me to be unpopular or even fired, then it’s probably a testament to that place’s terrible environment and low standards of work, innovation, genuine accountability.

It’s hard to talk about sensitive topics like death and suicide even when you are around friends you would consider close. But honestly, it’s even harder to broach these topics when you already know that your friend is robotic feeling-wise and doesn’t know how to express his emotions.

I have a friend who always says that when we get together, we’ll chat about things like greater purpose in life or what it really means to travel, or how being around a diverse group of people changes the way we perceive the world for the better. Those completely sound like elitist, privileged chatter subjects, but… it’s what we touch on in e-mails where we send each other links to articles that interest us. As I am getting older, I constantly find myself questioning the “why” of everything I do. It’s not like I voluntarily toil over it; the questions just subconsciously come.

But when we do actually get together for lunch or dinner or drinks, I realize that I leave him never having learned any new, undiscovered facet of him. It’s as though we at most may have touched these topics on the surface, and I am left still waiting for what I came to hear when he has already left. It’s troubling because then I wonder, how much do I really know this person, or how much do I really know anyone? Am I ever going to see that other side of him? Or maybe even worse, how well do even my closest friends genuinely know me if I cannot express myself fully when in their presence?

I am sitting in bed reading a book tonight when I look over to my left at framed photos of my brother, and I realize that it’s been just over ten years since I graduated from high school. Two of the photos are from May 2008, when I graduated from college, and my brother is with my parents at the Boston Commons and watching ducks swim. In the last photo, we are standing together on my high school graduation day, a sunny blue sky day in front of San Francisco City Hall, in June 2004, with me in my cap and gown, and him in a full suit and tie. We are both smiling at the camera, squinting from the sunlight.

Then I look closely at the suit Ed is wearing, and I wonder if it’s the suit we buried him in. I think it’s the same one.

He was really happy that day. His little sister was graduating from high school and about to start a new life in the Boston area. He was actually going to attend my graduation this time, unlike my middle school “graduation.” And he was going to shower me with all these gifts I didn’t really deserve to show how much he loved me and how proud he was.

He got all dressed up for me, which ended up peer pressuring all three of my cousins to at least wear button up shirts and slacks instead of their regular street clothes. “You’re wearing a suit?” One of my cousins asked Ed as we were getting ready to leave for Bill Civic Auditorium, where my high school graduation was held. “Why not?” Ed said. “Yvonne’s graduating!” My cousin immediately ran back to his room, obviously changing his mind about what to wear that day.

High school graduation was one of the happiest days of my life. I remember it with great clarity and pride; it was honestly a much happier period family-wise. I actually felt close to my cousins and my uncle, and I felt like we had as cohesive of an extended family I could have asked for. My entire family came – my parents, Ed, my two aunties and uncle on my dad’s side, and my three cousins who lived in the Bay Area. Everyone took the day off to see me walk across that stage and get my diploma. My then-boyfriend came, as did a couple of friends who had graduated the year before I did. I think I had to special request 12 graduation bids for my guests. My cousin’s now wife joined us for dinner that night at Roy’s but dropped an orchid lei off for me that morning, telling me I needed to have a lei at my graduation. My uncle had a special occasion lei ordered and shipped from Hawaii for me that day.

Ed was always suffering, but that day was probably one of those days that he suffered a little less. I still can’t believe it’s been ten years since that day. I keep thinking it in my mind, but I never thought that he wouldn’t be here ten years later, and it really hurts. I have no words anymore. It’s all like broken records to me. It will never stop hurting.