In two days, my dad is going to turn 66. That number just sounds weird to me. Maybe it’s because “666” is unlucky, or maybe it’s because as scary as it sounds, no man in the last two generations of my family on my dad’s side have lived past 64. It’s the second birthday he will be celebrating with my brother being gone from this world.

Last year, Ed passed away on July 22. It was unanticipated despite his struggle and constant discussion of feeling worthless and having no future. Last year was probably the only year when we did absolutely nothing to acknowledge my dad’s birthday because Ed’s death was so close to his 65th. Ed didn’t get to see our dad celebrate 65. He won’t be here to see him celebrate 66, or 76, or 86. Even if we were not a family to celebrate birthdays because of my mom’s religion and the dysfunctional relationship that my dad and Ed shared, this still makes me sad. Every day, our parents will grow older, and Ed will not be here to experience it.

A friend of mine, who is an only child, said to me that she is starting to feel the burden of being an only child in that she herself has the sole responsibility of caring for her parents in their elderly years. Sadly, I now have that responsibility, too, and it’s like I am an only child now that Ed isn’t with me anymore.

A good friend and I were chatting the other day, and she had asked me about what I thought in terms of location for events like bridal showers and bachelorette parties. I honestly hadn’t spent too much time thinking about it, but for a bridal shower if I do end up having one, I ideally would really like my mom and my aunt to be there. My mom would love to be at a party like this — an event that celebrates her one and only daughter getting married. She said she’s been hoping for my own bridal shower since she attended my cousin’s wife’s bridal shower back in 2007. That was over seven years ago. So if my mom is there, most likely the most reasonable place to have a bridal shower would be in San Francisco.

I thought about friends who I’d like to invite and where they would be coming from. I have a friend in Seattle who might want to come, a friend in Little Rock, some friends in New York. Where would they stay? I thought. Well, we do have space in my parents’ house. Some could sleep in our living room. And then I thought without really thinking, I wonder how Ed is going to feel with all these girls sleeping over at our house?

And then I stopped thinking, and my eyes welled up because I couldn’t believe I forgot again that he was gone. It’s like he’s so a part of that house to me that every time I imagine it, I just think he will always be there. Every step of the way looks to be difficult and painful.

I recently was lucky enough to get a 20% off coupon for 6pm.com, so I started doing some browsing, which led to browsing on other shoe sites. My friends and I like to share and ask each others’ opinions on clothes and shoes, so I sent links to two different pairs of shoes (one very dressy and formal, another more trendy and more for casual outings) to two of my friends on the same e-mail chain. I just ask in the e-mail what their thoughts are on these shoes, and my first friend responds that one pair is really cute, but the other pair, she cannot imagine would go with any wedding dress, and she asks what type of dress I’d consider wearing with it. I literally laughed out loud when I saw her response because no where in my e-mail did I mention that these were shoes I’d consider for my future wedding. My second friend responds and says that she thought I was looking at these as potential wedding shoes.

It’s funny that this happened because it’s almost like my friends are thinking about my wedding planning more than I actually am; I wasn’t thinking about wedding anything at all when I sent these links, but they just assumed I was and were replying with a wedding mindset. I guess this is how you know when your friends are completely roped into your wedding thinking and planning.

I haven’t dreamt of Ed in a long while, but last night, he came back to me in my dreams. Maybe he missed me and decided it was time to pay me a visit. Maybe his visit was influenced by the fact that I spoke to my friend over dinner about him last night.

It’s not a happy dream like it was the last time I can remember. I am sobbing again and trying to convince him not to jump off the bridge. This seems to be an old reoccurring theme in dreams that has come back again. He is in the living room of our house and announces to our mother and me that he is planning to jump on Tuesday at 4pm. Nothing we do will stop him; it’s been scheduled and has to go according to plan. I try to tell him that I love him, but he ignores me and walks away. He probably said Tuesday because last year, he jumped on Monday, July 22. This year, July 22 falls on a Tuesday.

Suddenly, a moment in the dream comes where I think, What? He’s still alive? He hasn’t jumped off the bridge yet. I can still save him. I will save him! I will make sure he doesn’t jump! I’m so excited because I think my brother is still living and can have a chance at life.

And then I wake up and realize that he is dead and that dream was just a dream. He really did die almost a year ago. I can’t believe it’s been almost a year. How did time go by so quickly without my Ed in my life?

I’ve had a variety of reactions when sharing the news of our engagement, but I think that the saddest ones are the complete lack of reactions from two of my cousins that I grew up with. It’s sad when you assume your family would care about happy news, or any significant news, in your life, and then you find out that it’s too difficult for them to even just say the words “congratulations” in any form – over the phone, text, e-mail – anything.

The responses from Chris’s side have by far been more positive, happy, and ecstatic than mine. Even his friends overall seem more excited than my own friends do. One of my best friends was tearing up when I told her about the engagement and said she anticipated crying her eyes out at our future wedding. That was probably the happiest reaction I have gotten. Two other friends were very logistical about it and mainly just asked about time frames and potential locations. His friends and family have done everything from scream and yell when they found out to actually personally call me and get the full proposal story at the wee hours of their nights. It’s been an interesting last week of seeing and experiencing reactions of people across both of our lives. In one way, it’s made me happy that there are so many people happy for us. But in another way, I’m a little bit disappointed that the reaction overall from my side hasn’t been as excited. It’s almost like a reflection of how dysfunctional my relationships are relative to Chris’s with his family and friends.

I know we agreed not to discuss wedding planning until the end of the year, but I can’t help but think about where the heck it’s actually going to be. My family is mostly in the Bay Area (and New York), and his family is mostly in Australia, Singapore, and India. I have a number of friends who are on tight budgets or just plain broke, so asking them to fly all the way to Australia or some exotic location in the middle of the Pacific Ocean seems like a big request. He has not-so-mobile grandmothers in Melbourne and Chennai. We both have family and/or friends with babies. How are we going to get as many of our loved ones together as possible for our wedding day? I hope that the fact I am thinking about this now is not an indicator of how obsessive I may be as a bride. 🙂

The proposal happened last Tuesday in Rio. We told our parents that evening via the phone. My mother did not initially hear me, and then that transitioned into her hearing me (it was a bad phone connection given our sub-par Wi-Fi), but not believing it really happened. She said, “Are you sure? This is real? Did he actually say the words, ‘Will you marry me,’ or did he just give you a ring? You are sure?'” Leave it to my mother to make the happiest moments in my life seem like the worst and most ambiguous.

Since we arrived back in New York on Monday, she has made sure to ask me those same questions yet again, and then end the conversation by saying, “I’m happy for you… for now.” My response: “What is that supposed to mean – ‘for now’?!” She says, “Well, you haven’t even set a date yet. Sometimes there is a proposal or engagement, but the wedding never happens.”

It’s always comforting to know how predictable people in your life can be. And then when you think about it a little bit more, you realize the negativity that surrounds their psyche is something you will just never be able to penetrate. We can’t change other people as much as we may want, especially our own parents.

Our office got a Nespresso maker with a milk foamer, and yesterday, some colleagues and I were tinkering with it. I somehow ended up deciding to have a double shot of espresso with foam at 4pm. I should have known it would mess up my ability to fall asleep that night.

I don’t think I ended up falling asleep until past 1 this morning, but I remember the most convoluted series of dreams that I’ve had in a while. In the first dream, I’m at home with my mom and Ed. My mom has just come back from work. It appears I am in elementary school and Ed is in high school. She’s obviously had a bad day because she starts yelling at both of us about the single dirty dish left in the sink. “Were you waiting for me to come home from work to wash this for you?” she yells from the kitchen. “All dishes should have been washed before I came home!” She started slamming drawers and doors in the kitchen, and Ed sulks on the couch in the living room, rolling his eyes and giving me a sympathizing glance. I get really angry, and I run down the hall to my room, slam the door, and lock it. My mom starts screaming at me for slamming and demands I open the door. I refuse. I hear Ed cheering for me outside the door.

In the next dream, Chris and I are at some random museum where we are viewing miniature roller coaster ride models. A friend from middle school pops up, and she is apparently our docent for this tour. She seems like she doesn’t want to guide us and is being passive aggressive with me.

In the last dream, I am at work and feeling miserable. My colleagues are all ignoring me. I guess that’s somewhat familiar, but still unsettling.

Last night, I dreamt I was in a car in Lake Placid with my parents and Ed, except that it looked nothing like what I remembered from our weekend trip a few weeks ago with Chris and his parents. We were driving up what looked to be a massive plastic red slide, and I was wondering if that was supposed to be covered in snow for people to sled or ski down during the winter. Ed was asking where we were going, and I told him we were upstate in Lake Placid. He didn’t seem particularly excited about the trip at all. And the sky looked pretty gray and miserable.

It was one of those very uneventful dreams where nothing really great or terrible happened, and you wake up wondering what the point of all that was.

Today, Chris’s parents, Chris, and I spent the day exploring Lake Placid, walking around Mirror Lake, wine tasting at wineries that had grapes from the Finger Lakes, and finally hiking up Mount Jo, a popular mountain in the Adirondacks. Going up, while strenuous, was a straight one-mile hike, with some muddiness, wetness, and a lot of rocks. I was hesitant at first to suggest it since I wasn’t sure how comfortable his parents would be, but Chris insisted we do it, and they were pretty willing and were really positive about it the whole time despite being challenged by certain rocks and slippery areas.

Going down was another story. There are two trails to get up and down the mountain – the short trail, which is steeper and rockier that we took, and then the longer trail, which is supposedly flatter and easier. We took the short route up and decided to follow the fellow hikers in front of us and took the long trail down. Somewhere along the way, we lost them because they were going to fast, and we ended up at a stream that went straight down. I knew we were not jumping down this stream to get back to the parking lot. We ended up hiking all the way back up to the intersection of the long and short trail and hiking down the short trail to get back down, racing against the clock since the sun was slowly but surely setting. In the end, we were all fine and relieved to get back before dark. Chris’s parents were such good sports about it and even joked about it on and off throughout the rest of the evening; I think the muddiness bothered his dad more than getting lost and potentially spending the night at the top of a mountain.

I imagined this situation happening with my parents, and I know for a fact they never would have taken it as well as Chris’s parents did and probably would have yelled at me. They’d probably hold it against me and never let me hear the end of it. That’s usually what happens when we do something “bad” in our family. We’re never allowed to forget it, and then constantly get reminded of our blunders years and years later when it was so long ago that we ourselves have forgotten.