So I booked this trip for my parents, Chris, and I to go to Phoenix in April to see the Grand Canyon. We have one day completely dedicated to the Grand Canyon and Sedona, but we have 1.5 days where we have nothing planned yet. I’m really trying to keep in mind things my parents would not like to do or eat (you have to eliminate a lot to get to what my parents are willing to do). Frank Lloyd Wright’s Taliesin West is right in the area in Scottsdale, so I sent the link to my dad and asked if he or my mom would be interested. His e-mail reply: “She’s not interested in seeing anything. She’s suffering from depression!” Well, guess what… I booked this trip for all of us to enjoy the area and see as much as possible, so as much as you would like for us to sit in the hotel and do nothing all day, I’m not going to allow that to happen. So I’m booking this event for us, and they’re just going to have to come along whether they want to whine about it or not.

The trouble with having parents (or, a parent) who want to see the worst in everything and everyone is that they, without knowing it, really prevent you from actually enjoying things. Even the littlest and most trivial events or plans become massive problems and causes of pain.

My one week has passed in San Francisco, and I’m back to New York today. Time really flew by quickly, and I feel like I really didn’t do that much.

In March of last year when I came home for two weeks and flew back to New York, I felt miserable. I was scared about my brother’s future and how he was going to cope with his problems and life overall, I was scared about my mom’s health and the stress she felt around my brother, and I was scared about my family in general being in such a sad, negative place and seeming to be unable to get out of it. Now, a year later, Ed is gone, and each of my parents is struggling to cope in his and her own way. The stress of worrying about my brother’s future is gone because he is gone, but now there’s a different type of stress that looms – thinking about my mother’s ability to cope without him and retain her health, and my dad’s ability to stay healthy and not be so negative and irritable. When we become negative and saddened, we are at more risk to fall ill.

My biggest fear used to be that I’d lose my brother in the way that I did. Now, it’s that I could lose my parents because of how weak and vulnerable they are, especially my mom. And then I think about the same things I used to think about with Ed – how I’d cope knowing he wouldn’t be here the rest of my life to see big potential events happen for me – engagement, marriage, pregnancy, children, buying homes. I think about that now in the context of my parents, and I’m scared. I don’t sit here and obsess about it, but it’s a fear in the back of my mind that they won’t be here when any of those things happen. I don’t have a schedule for any of those things, and none of those thing seem very close to happening. Sometimes, it’s like you are waiting for something to happen, but you have no idea what will happen and when. That really sucks.

It’s interesting how we all cope with pain in our own ways and choose (or not choose) to show it. Ever since my good friend from college got diagnosed with a rare form of lymphoma last August, every time I’ve spoken with her, it’s been hard to detect any true fear or pain on her end, yet I know she is scared and worrying every day. I have no idea what it is like to think that I could possibly die of an illness. I still struggle to understand what Ed felt like in his own despairing, lonely flesh and blood existence.

Human beings are such strange creatures. We live our lives every day going through different motions and habits, trying to achieve certain things that are tangible or not tangible. Yet in doing that, we all have different adversities and demons we grapple with that may make achieving any of those things even more difficult than for another person not facing the same set of issues. I sit on the bus or train and walk by thousands of people every single day. We pass each other, exchange a glance across a subway car, bump into each other in a rush. We have everyday conversations – “Hi! How are you?” Fine, thanks! How was your weekend? Did you do anything fun?” Yet we have no idea what each others’ feelings or pains or demons are. Sometimes, that must feel really alienating and lonely. We’re in this big world full of billions of people surrounding us every day, but if no one really understands you, it’s like this big sun-lit world is just a small, dark hole with just you in it.

I went in to work at my company’s office here in San Francisco, in the “up and coming” Design Destrict that is borderline Portrero Hill where tech startups are signing leases, and where homeless men peeing while smiling at you as you are walking to a food truck is completely normal. A colleague whose sister lives in my parents’ neighborhood was nice enough to offer me a ride home afterwards. As we were exchanging notes on overprotective parents, he asked if I had any siblings. “Yeah, I have an older brother,” I said. He’s dead, but you don’t have to know that, the voice in my head said silently.

It’s such a normal, everyday question to be asked if you have any brothers and sisters. No one thinks anything of it. I freely ask people all the time if they have siblings. But now that Ed isn’t here, I really hate the question. It’s like I have to pretend that everything is normal, that yes, I do have an older brother, and of course he’s around! No one wants to know if you have any family drama, or if your sibling died in some freak accident, or if he committed suicide. How do you go about telling people about your sibling who is no longer living anymore, anyway? If you never talked much about your siblings before, why would you suddenly start just because they are dead?

I still have a couple of friends I haven’t told. Part of me thinks they wouldn’t really care – we weren’t that close to begin with. I don’t really care to share the information because it would just cause me needless anguish, and they don’t gain anything from it, anyway. I don’t want any more pain.

I’m going home tomorrow. I feel a little happy about it because I get to see my parents again, but I mostly feel depressed since I know Ed won’t be there. I spent most of today in a frenzy with work since a lot of my responsibilities are changing and I have a lot of different things to accomplish with my newly defined role, but aside from that, I just kept thinking about the idea of going home and knowing that Ed will never be there again. Actually, he’ll never be anywhere other than in my dreams. I hope he’ll be there when I eventually die and join his world. He’s supposed to open the door to heaven for me. We never talked about this out right, but we agreed… sort of. Okay, fine. I told him he has to do this for me, but he’d do it anyway because he loves me. But I can’t even count on that happening.

Is this how I am going to feel every time I go home – miserable because he will never be there again? Am I always going to wonder if I in some way contributed to his life’s misery or if there was really, truly, absolutely nothing else I could have done to help him?

I keep looking at the Lenox Butterfly Meadow cups he gave me. And then I started Googling the entire line, wondering if maybe I buy everything Lenox Butterfly Meadow related that maybe he’d be happy for me to continue what he started to buy for me. I don’t have enough space in this apartment for all this china. I don’t have space for all of this stuff in any New York City apartment. I think I am just looking for something to obsess about that is Ed-related.

It’s another sign of age when you start experiencing ailments that always used to make you wonder why everyone else experienced that and you never did. For me, that ailment was the creepy headache.

I don’t think I’d ever gotten a real headache before the age of 27. If I said I did, I was probably lying to get out of something. But yesterday morning, I started getting one. I could feel the pulsing beginning slowly. I managed to not only go to lunch, finish a number of things at work and complete the work day, but even survive a 2.5 hour mentor training session after work. Then I went home, tried to sleep, and failed. I don’t even remember what time I actually fell asleep.

Then my trusty gym alarm on my phone goes off at 5:45 this morning, and I think, yay, the headache is gone! I shut off my alarm to start getting dressed for my workout, and as soon as I get on my feet, this overwhelming pain takes over my temples and all over my head, and I decide to skip the gym. And work. Yet I have all these work e-mails piling up that even though I have a headache, I know I will be working from home anyway.

Whoever decided headaches should be something that people should experience is such a jerk.

Sometimes, when I have those really brief moments when I miss home and contemplate moving to be closer to my parents, I am brought back to reality quite abruptly when my mother decides to pick a fight with me over something completely inane and caused by herself.

My dad informs me over the phone today that my mom has planned a dinner for us with her loser Jehovah’s Witness friend and her best friend and husband next Wednesday. I told my dad that I was never informed of this plan and had already made dinner plans with my friend and her husband. My mom snatches the phone from my dad and says that I cannot prioritize “outside people” before her and that I do not care about her and do not realize how depressed she is. Just because she seems okay does not mean she is. I simply said, I already made plans. I am not cancelling them. This is far from the first time this has happened.

I don’t know if she will ever realize that I am not going to cancel on everyone else in my life just to accommodate her no-reason schedule that she just assumes she gets to create and the rest of the world must revolve around. Ed didn’t want to deal with it anymore, so he left us. I don’t want to deal with it anymore, either.

I really think it’s a sign of age when you realize that you can’t eat anywhere as much as you used to before. Tonight, my best friend and I had cheap, delicious hand-pulled noodles Henan-style at Spicy Village, then proceeded to Kung Fu Tea for hot taro bubble tea and shared half-off egg custard tarts from Manna House Bakery. And I felt so stuffed that I couldn’t really sleep very well. Actually, it took me three hours to fall asleep. And then I woke up feeling sluggish and disgusting.

Once upon a time, that would not have been that much food. But when lying in bed, I could just feel the food sitting there, sticking to my stomach, making me regret getting that bubble tea (but not the noodles or egg tart). Oh, age.

Last night before bed, I started reading Tennessee Williams’s The Glass Menagerie. It’s a memory play I’ve always wanted to read, especially after I really enjoyed Streetcar Named Desire. I was only ten pages into it but already felt like Laura, one of the four characters in the play, reminded me of Ed. Laura is the main character’s older sister, and she experiences some illness at a young age that results in her being disabled for the rest of her life. Because of this, she also is extremely fragile mentally. The way she responds to things is like the more feminine version of my brother.

I went to sleep and dreamt that I was home again, and to my surprise Ed was there. I kept thinking in my mind, he is still alive? And suddenly we start having a conversation during which he tells me that he has just ten more days to live before he will take his life. He continues about his business in the house, reading his Bible, cutting and eating fruit, going to the bathroom to floss. I sit there and don’t do anything. I just think. I think of all the ways that I can prevent him from taking his life in the next ten days. Maybe we can do some activity together that I know he will love, and in his moment when he is about to jump, he remembers how much fun we had just a few days before and decides he wants to do that again! Or maybe I can have him listen to Shania Twain and ask him, is this really the last time you want to hear that amazing voice? Or maybe on the tenth day, I could just prevent him from escaping my presence, tackle him, and then just sit on top of him and not get up. Well, it may have worked. Who knows.

I woke up and felt distraught and unmotivated, so I skipped the gym. Again. In reality, he really did succeed in leaving me. I wonder what it would have been like if ten days before July 22, I really did know for sure that he would leave me forever.

We’re all bad listeners. Even if we say we are good listeners, we’re all really just crap at it. Even quiet people who claim to be great listeners still want to be heard; their struggle to speak is just more silent. We’re human beings; that’s the way we are programmed.

One of the worst feelings, though, when having a conversation, is when you are cut off, and not just cut off once, but repeatedly – over and over and over again. This happened a number of times during a three-way conversation today among me and two other men today. Initially, I thought, these jerks. They’re doing this because I’m the only woman in the conversation! I can do this, too! So I started cutting them off. But as I stood there and observed, I realized that they were doing the same exact thing to each other. It led to a number of misunderstandings, which I was able to clear up at the very end of this conversation that really should have lasted about 1/4 of how long it did last.

Everyone really just needs to shut up and listen. It’s not going to kill you to wait a few extra seconds and listen to what the other person has to say. I feel exhausted.