One of my best friends is living in Singapore with her husband’s family, and she just told me that her husband’s paternal grandmother passed away on Tuesday after a number of health problems. She was 88 — seems like a nice, long life to me since no one in my family who has passed has even successfully made it past 80. As per the cultural tradition, the four days following her death are a long wake, during which family and friends come and pay their respects at all hours of the day to view her body. Someone from the family has to be there (and awake) the entire time, so the close family members take turns staying awake until the day of the funeral, which is this Friday.

There are so many cultural traditions around death in the world that are so diverse and complex. I know I probably couldn’t personally handle most of them. One of the traditions Chris told me about was that in Maori death custom, if a mother passes, her daughter must stay with the dead body for 48 hours straight.

When I heard that, I thought, I don’t even think I could go even a fourth or a fifth of that with Ed’s.

Shortly after Ed died last year, my uncle sent me a book to help me grapple with my feelings called Staying on Top When Your World Turns Upside Down. The book is about how to deal with traumatic life experiences while getting stronger in the process. It’s written by a woman who is not only a stress psychologist, but has also gone through her own experience of prematurely losing her younger brother to a very preventable disease at the age of 22.

I finally decided to open it today, and I’m about one-third through it. I think I’ve gotten to a point in my grieving where I’ve gone through all of the stages she describes and am pretty much at the final stage, which never really ends until you die. But there’s one point that she makes in the book that I’ve never actively thought about before:

“Extremely stressful life events rob us of our masks, the devices that ordinarily shield us from the fact of our own death. So, when our life undergoes upheaval, not only do we suffer from the losses that are associated with that specific trauma, we quake at the reminder that one day we will lose our most precious possession–our very own life. It is important to realize that the terror of trauma gives us a great opportunity to resolve the primordial fear we all experience.”

I’m not sure I immediately thought about my own life and how I could die when my brother died. What I did think about, though, was how short life really is. We think of it when we are young as being long and full of potential. I’m 28 years old now, and I cannot believe time has passed by this quickly. I can’t believe I’ve been in the full-time workforce for over six years now, I can’t believe that I have friends who are married, getting married, and having babies, and I can’t believe over a year and two months have passed since I lost Ed. The last time I ever saw my brother, he was saying goodbye to me at the airport in San Francisco, and I gave him a long, tight hug. I didn’t think then that that would be the last time I’d ever see him alive. Every time I think about that last glimpse and feel of him, I feel a sick feeling in my throat even until this day. I was touching him then, and now, he’s gone forever. Things pass us by too quickly, and sometimes I feel like I don’t have enough time to actually enjoy it all.

I don’t want to have the attitude that I just need to survive, though. I want to feel like I’m doing more than just surviving each day since my brother’s passing. I want to feel like I am actually thriving and doing something meaningful. I don’t know if I will ever be able to do enough to fully feel like I am preserving him, though.

In the last several months, two of my friends have finished writing fiction novels. One has actually been published and is available on Amazon and in print, while the other is only available online via a free e-novel publishing site. The first one was written by a college friend, who loosely based the novel on her own experiences as a 22-year-old senior in college, unsure of what to do with her life upon her impending graduation, and she ends up in a relationship with someone over 20 years older. The novel walks us through what that relationship looks like, along with all the baggage that comes with being in a relationship with someone that much older (he is in the midst of a divorce with a woman with whom he had three daughters, and this was not one of those amicable breakups). The novel eventually takes us to Italy for Christmas, as well as the house of the older man’s ex-wife’s parents for New Year’s Eve. The second book is a teenage mystery novel-type that explores serial killings in the San Francisco area. Its main character bears a very strong resemblance to my friend who wrote it.

I finished reading the novel of my college friend. While there were entertaining parts to it and characters that I found comical, it didn’t feel quite real to me. At the end, I was left wondering how I was supposed to feel at the end. Usually, there tends to be some sort of sympathy we feel as readers to the protagonist, but in this case, I ended my reading thinking she was just plain pathetic.

I suppose it’s normal that when starting out writing novels that people tend to write about parts of their own lives because that’s what they know the most about. We try to make sense of our lives by writing about it, sharing our writing with others, and then seeing how they respond to it. I once read a quote by a critic that said that memoirs written by anyone under the age of 22 are ridiculous because what do these people know about life being so young? We think at 22 that the problems and dramas that face us are significant, that perhaps we are “more mature” than others our same age, yet 20 years later, we tend to look back and laugh at ourselves for taking our relatively trivial lives so seriously.

I’ve often thought about writing fiction based on my own life. I used to dream about writing a novel loosely based on my own experiences, particularly around my family. But then I get cynical and wonder who would actually read it. I don’t want to write some sob story about my familial dysfunction where people patronizingly think, “Oh, poor her,” or think I’m trying to blame the world for the obstacles and pains that I’ve experienced. What would the theme be? What would I ultimately be trying to convey by the end of sharing that story?

Then my thoughts immediately reverted to this blog and why I choose to write here and make this public. I guess I do write to try to make sense of what is around me, and I write about things so deeply personal like my brother and my family because I’d like to think that maybe it could help someone else who has to face something similar. Maybe for most of my friends who are emotionally removed, they can read this blog and try to understand me better…if they’d like. I’m sure most of them think they already understand me well enough, which I frankly doubt.  And for those who do not know me and will never know me, they can read this blog and know that there is someone else out there in the universe that goes through similar pains and confusions and experiences, and similarly is trying to find meaning in life the way I am.

The last weeks have been odd for me sleep-wise. Because I usually wake up early for the gym, I get tired by around 9:30-10:30 and am usually in bed by 10:30. I would fall asleep fairly quickly, and by 5:30am, my natural internal clock would automatically wake me up to anticipate my 5:50am alarm. However, there’s always been a day or two every week for the last few weeks when I just can’t fall asleep. I’ll lie there, toss and turn, and not fall asleep until around 2 or 3am. I’m not quite sure why. To try to get myself to sleep naturally the other week, I drank two glasses of wine before bed. Well, that did the trick then.

I didn’t recall any dreams until after Chris’s 6:50am alarm went off this morning. By that time, I’d already given up getting up for the gym and stayed in bed. I dreamt that my mother had just seen my aunt, and she started whining and crying about how she tries to move on, but she can’t forget about Ed, especially when my aunt calls her every day at 2:19pm to remind her that Ed is gone.

What is so significant about 2:19pm? Is that the time he left the house to go to the Golden Gate Bridge?

This whole year, I’ve managed to make one new friend, and he just happens to live in New Jersey, which clearly is not that convenient. Our hangouts have usually been during lunch since we work fairly close to each other, yet given his 1.5 hour commute each way between home and the office, after work doesn’t work, and on weekends, he usually stays in Jersey. I’ve become like the Chris in our friendship — he has shared quite a bit with me, but I haven’t shared much with him that is below the surface.

We were chatting over Google Chat today, and I was telling him about my weekend plans for theater, making dosa, watching the Australian Grand Final (or really, sitting next to Chris while he watches it and I pretend to watch), among other things. He said to me, you have such a happy life. Things seem so good for you. I smiled when I read this. There’s a lot you have no idea about, I responded.

It’s not that I don’t agree with him. I know that overall, I do have a happy life. I live in a city that I love, I work in a buzzing industry with pretty attractive remuneration, I have a life partner who is fully here for me in every possible way, I travel a lot and pursue many different interests and hobbies, and I have friends I love who care about me.

But like the majority of us in the developed world, I have what is known as the deficit attention disorder — I pay attention to what is missing or not good. I think about my unstable mother, my emotionally void father, their dysfunctional marriage and dilapidated and cluttered accident-prone home, and our overall dysfunctional and contentious wider family. I think about Ed and how and why he died. I think about how I don’t have a living brother anymore and how that will plague me the rest of my life, and how no one really can understand that unless they’ve experienced the same thing. I actually said that to my friend the other day over the phone — “I think his death is going to plague me until I die.” The response was total silence. What kind of response am I expecting when I say something like that, anyway?

My mom called tonight to voice her concern at the potential thought that we may decide to have a church wedding. It took some time to calm her down and confirm with her that no, we would not be having a church wedding. She launched into a repeated, angry rant (I’ve heard this rant at least 50 times in the last seven years) regarding my second oldest cousin, who married a woman who was born Catholic, barely practiced it, yet insisted that my cousin convert to Catholicism so that she could have her dream Catholic church wedding. What this ultimately meant for my cousin’s mom and my own mom was that neither of them could watch my cousin get married since they are Jehovah’s Witnesses, and apparently JWs cannot enter another religion’s house of worship. They sat in a car outside the church for the entire three-hour ceremony in the summer of 2007.

At the time, I wasn’t that happy about the situation. No where in the JW version of the Bible does it explicitly state that you cannot enter another religion’s church, yet the “elders” at the congregation advised both my aunt and my mom not to do it. But what annoyed me even more than this was that my cousin’s now wife completely disregarded her future mother-in-law. She didn’t care that her husband’s mother wouldn’t see them get married. It was her wedding, so she wanted it the way she wanted it (my cousin has no balls or opinion, so clearly he did not speak at all during this). At the time I thought, wow, this is just going to pave the way for a very unpleasant future relationship between my aunt and her first daughter-in-law. In the end, I predicted correctly — it’s been terrible ever since.

I can see both sides to the situation, but at the end of the day, I would never do something explicitly against what my future in-laws wanted, especially if it were something as significant as our wedding. It wouldn’t speak well to how I feel about them and “consider” their feelings, and it also doesn’t set a good precedent for future relations. Yet at the same time in this situation, I don’t have a strong feeling about a church wedding; in fact, I am more opposed to it than for it. Neither of us is particularly religious. He was baptized Christian and does nothing Christian anymore, and I believe in God and practice nothing. Having a church wedding in our case would just seem like we were being phony or trying to please his parents or grandmothers. It would certainly not please anyone on my side.

Tonight, I went to see a play with a friend called I Like to Be Here: Jackson Heights Revisited, Or, This is a Mango. It was probably one of the best shows I’ve seen in a while, and my friend and I were laughing almost the entire time because of the ethnic interpretations and the very not politically correct statements made.

Jackson Heights is a neighborhood in Queens that I frequented several times a month when I lived in Queens, as it was just two stops away (or about a 25-minute walk) from my old Elmhurst apartment, and even now that I’ve moved into Manhattan, I go there about every couple of months. I’ve always looked at it as a fun, boisterous area full of immigrants, primarily from South Asia and Latin America, but with a good sprinkling of pretty much every ethnicity known to humans. It was portrayed as such in this play, but then I suppose my “yuppie” status was made obvious.

There’s a scene where an assumed to be middle-class white man bumps into a poorer Latina woman (who is a prostitute trying to earn more money to support her child and 10 other relatives in a one-bedroom apartment in Jackson Heights). The white man says to the Latina that Jackson Heights is a “historic neighborhood” in New York City and starts talking about the neighborhood’s rich cultural history. The Latina immediately feels and looks annoyed, and she makes it clear to him that this neighborhood is hardly a “historic” neighborhood — it’s a place where poor immigrants just try their best to survive, hence her tiny apartment housing 12 family members. That type of living situation is the norm for her and her neighbors there.

I don’t think I’ve ever thought of Jackson Heights as a “historic neighborhood” — I’ve always looked at it as the spot to get great Indian, Filipino, South American, Mexican, or many other ethnic foods for a really cheap price. It’s the place I can go for great ethnic markets where I can find all the spices and vegetables I could only dream of getting at Fairway or Whole Foods, or God forbid Gristedes. I guess I am closer to that white man in my experiences of Jackson Heights than the Latina woman.

Ever since we got engaged, I’ve been randomly reading different wedding blogs here and there, from standard ones like theknot.com and lover.ly to more practical ones like, well, apracticalwedding.com. Today, I read an article about a marriage that ended because the couple decided from the get-go that they did not want children… until three years later, he changed his mind. And then they divorced.

It was a very simple story; there was nothing incredibly deep or pointed about it. It was really just a story of how people evolve and change, and sometimes, they cannot evolve and change with each other and have to allow the other to change without themselves in the picture in that respect. You might be able to compromise on things like your ideal place to live vs. his because of life circumstances or better career prospects, but you can’t really compromise on something like having children or not. A real person’s life is at stake. If you are the one who didn’t want children, you are giving in to a life that you did not want and responsibilities you never cared to have, and it could end in resentment for your partner and your innocent child.

It made me feel sad to read this. All this talk about vows and spending the rest of our lives together and “’til death do us part” made me think about all the “unknowns” out there that could face us as our life continues, the positives and the negatives. It scares me a little to think of the challenges in our future and how much of what makes up our lives is completely out of my own control, of our own control even.

I recently read a book about friendships that talks about how all of your friends that you choose in your life fall into one of eight important friend categories. I’d say that of all the friend categories, I’m probably the worst connector. It’s not that I choose to not introduce my friends to each other. The problem is that my friends generally do not like each other or “click” much. And when trying to get connected, I don’t always get along that well with my friends’ friends. Or maybe I should stop saying that because I recently was introduced to a guy friends’ friends, and we got along quite well last week. So maybe the problem is my female friends’ friends?!

I was at my friend’s house last night for dinner with Chris, and she and her boyfriend decided to take us to her friend’s house party that wasn’t too far away. I was a little bit out of it since I’d had a bit to drink, but I realized that not a single person even tried to talk to me. I tried talking to one person, but it fell a bit flat. Was I dressed differently? Did I have a death stare (I highly doubt this)? The entire ambiance felt like a high school party, and somehow, I just felt so old the entire time I was there and wanted to leave. I didn’t want to be rude about it, so I stayed for some time to try to give it a chance, and we eventually left. i noticed that Chris didn’t talk to anyone, either, and I saw no one approach him. The last thing I heard someone say to us as we waited for our Uber was that we “don’t need to wait behind the gate; it’s safe to stand on the sidewalk.” Yes, because apparently we give off the vibe that we never hang out in Bushwick.

My friend and I will never be each others’ connectors, sadly, even if we did try.

Chris and I got into a small spat today about our families, and during it, he told me that whenever I am home in San Francisco or come back from there, I am always exponentially more tense. I smile very little, and I’m not really myself, or the self that he knows and loves. It’s really annoying when someone points out something obvious about yourself that you know is true, but you don’t want to admit out loud.

It’s like how I hate thinking about how pretty much all of the happiest moments of my life have been without my parents there. Other than the day of my high school graduation, which I loved and still look back fondly on, every other time has been a time when they were not there: my Olympic National Park trip as an eighth grader with my classmates, including some of my best friends today; the Seattle trip I took in the summer of 2004 with Ed and our cousin, the first semester of Wellesley; studying abroad in Shanghai; pretty much all of my travels that did not include them; the day during my college years when Ed and I spent the whole day alone together celebrating his birthday, exploring a museum, and eating Thai together; the day we got engaged.

When they are around, things are made more complicated and tense, everything that is good has to be looked at under a microscope to identify what is wrong, and even the best situations become bad because they dwell on the worst aspects of everything, even if they are minuscule. It’s like it will forever be my life struggle — trying to be happy amidst all of their drama and self-induced pain.