Today, Chris and I flew into Phoenix and met my parents for our long weekend of exploring Phoenix, Scottsdale, Sedona, and the Grand Canyon National Park. As an added bonus, I arranged some time with my friend from Wellesley, who I haven’t seen since graduation almost six years ago. She moved to China to teach English, found an expat she fell in love with, got married, and moved back to Arizona with him.

It was hard to read her husband in the beginning. He was very quiet, serious, and had interesting eye movements. He was soft spoken most of the time and seemed very intent on… just observing. Based on what I know about my friend, I knew she would not pick a boring mute as a husband, so I knew he was a deep-thinker type, so eventually he started opening up, and I discovered his crazy sense of humor and wit that would no doubt attract my friend who I traveled to China with. He’s a balloon artist (not the clown type), and his goal in life is to make kids happy. If someone else said this to me, I’d call their bluff. When he said this to us, I really believed it.

After they generously dropped us off at our hotel at the end of the evening and we were parting ways, he gives me a big hug (as he’s a big man) and says, “Even though we spent the last several hours together, I realize I didn’t really get to ask you much. What is your purpose in life? What do you live for?” The question caught me so off guard that I initially just laughed. Because it was a big question for the minute we had left together, I said to him that I was still searching for my purpose and didn’t quite know what it was just yet.

In the midst of all my traveling, reading, brain games, theater, cooking, eating, exercising, grocery shopping, friends, family, cute things obsessing – what the hell is my purpose, anyway?

Today, I had a visit with my therapist again. I can count on one hand the number of visits I have left with her before she ends her time here. We talked about my upcoming trip to Phoenix and the Grand Canyon with my parents and Chris, and my thoughts around it.

I explained to her that my parents generally don’t take vacations. It’s not that they can’t afford it; they certainly can, but my dad is a homebody and generally doesn’t like to go anywhere because he likes being in familiar areas and thinks everything is a rip off or too expensive, and my mom is scared of the world and won’t go anywhere unless someone else suggests it to her first and then guides her around there (my dad won’t do this). So I told my therapist that unless I book, plan, and go with them on any “vacations,” the vacation will never happen for them.

She responds and says how mature that is on my part. She thinks it’s amazing I recognize this fact about my parents, but want to enhance their lives by planning these trips and then even going along with them, as she can imagine most kids would NOT want to do this, and would merely think, “eh, they’re miserable,” and let their parents continue on in their misery. They are who they are. I think I am getting too much credit for this.

While traveling with my parents is certainly not the easiest thing to do, I’m willing to do this because I’d like us to have shared, happy experiences, and I want them to see that there is more to life than all the work and pain and suffering they’ve had to go through. In most cases, the most rewarding things in life are not the easiest things to do.

The sad part about this trip is that we were supposed to have taken it this time last year with Ed. I guess this time, Chris and Bart will have to go in his place.

He came again. It’s been over a month since I last saw him in my dreams.

I was standing in some factory setting, and I saw my dad instructing Ed how to lift these big bars that had heavy metal hangers carrying sliced meat and sausages. It was the strangest scene ever. Each sausage link dangled individually from the hangers. Ed seemed apprehensive about the weight of the big metal bars and hangers, but he submissively went along with what my dad said, probably in fear that he’d get yelled at.

So my dad takes the front of the cart of bars, and Ed takes the back. Ed is obviously struggling to keep them up because they are so heavy, and seconds later, I see him stumble and fall, the heavy metal bars coming down after him, on top of him. I immediately rush over to him to see if he’s all right. I push the metal bars off of him, and he climbs out. I can see he’s been injured. There were some sharp metal edges on the bars, and parts of his face and the back of his neck have been cut. I happen to have a damp cloth in my hand, and I start wiping away some of the blood from his wounds. I ask him if he’s okay, and he nods and says he is fine.

This is by far the strangest dream I’ve had with Ed. Who dreams of people carrying metal carts of hanging sausages and then getting injured by them?

Today marks eight months since I lost my brother. Even though he has left this world, he’s come back to visit me quite a bit in my dreams. It has progressed from dreams of him dying in different ways, his confessing he wanted to die and my trying to convince him not to end his life, his squeamishness when I’d try to hug him or grab him and running away from me, to his acceptance of my love for him through my hugs and squeezes. It sounds almost like I made all of this up – this progression – when I reflect upon it now, but I’ve been blogging a lot about him since he passed away eight months ago today, and I have a record of all my dreams of him right here.

In the beginning, I told my mom a few times that he’d come to me in dreams, and she would give me this sad look and say, “you got to see him? I never have any dreams with him. It’s not fair.” She was envious that he wouldn’t come to her. Now, eight months later, she called me and told me that she finally dreamt of him. In the dream, she went out to the living room at our house and noticed the TV on. She thought it was weird because my dad was already in bed, I was obviously in New York, and Ed was gone, so why would the TV be on? She went out there to see Ed sitting. He was dressed in what looked like new clothing, his skin tanner, and a little more meat on his body than she remembered. She immediately cried out, “Ed? Is that you? Is it really you?” And she tried walking closer to him to touch him, but he kept backing away slowly from her, just staring. He wouldn’t let her touch him.

That’s like the dreams I had shortly after he passed away. I’d always try to hug him or touch him, but he’d get squeamish and struggle out my grasp or run away from me. Then I’d start crying because of how much I missed him. My mom woke up yelling, and my dad had to calm her down. She felt miserable the rest of the day. I suppose this is part of the healing process. Maybe now, Ed is finally ready to visit her in her dreams. He couldn’t allow her to see him before now. And maybe now, she will be ready to fully accept that he isn’t one of us anymore.

It’s been eight months. I still have moments where I still can’t understand how it had to come to this. I have moments when I still go numb thinking about my brother being dead, and my mind goes blank and I can’t think of anything else. I don’t think anyone ever fully recovers from tragedies like this.

Tonight, Chris and I had dinner at Brushstroke, David Bouley’s venture into Japanese kaiseki cuisine. It was an incredible dining experience with some very unique flavors. We had probably the best and richest miso soup; it was made with a guinea hen broth and a bright, clean white miso. We ate snail-shaped ferns for the first time. I also had my first soy milk-based panna cotta, as well as an unconventional affogato made with matcha green tea ice cream and a white chocolate and nigori sake. Even the cocktails we ordered were some of the best we’ve ever drank.

One odd thing about our dining experience was the couple sitting next to us. Since being with Chris, I have a higher tendency to half eavesdrop on surrounding conversations at restaurants here and there. So I was half listening to their conversation and observing their moments. Sometimes, they seemed very loving and affectionate. At other times, they seemed distant and strained. They were discussing a child I assumed was hers but not his. And I think they were married. And the biggest shocker came at the very end of their meal when I realized that they were getting separate checks.

If you are married, or at least in a long term relationship with someone you love, why would you ever split a check down the middle and pay with separate credit cards? They even consulted on how much each should be tipping. I understand the need to be “equal” and want everyone to contribute, but isn’t splitting a romantic dinner check down the middle a bit of an overkill (and a mood killer for the rest of the evening)? There is something to be said for going overboard on keeping track of everything down to the last cent – lifetime partnership should operate like human relationships, not business transactions.

I’ve been addicted to Ken Follett for the last month or so. I began reading his historical fiction novel Fall of Giants last month, and that quickly became an obsession that led me to not only finish that monstrosity of an audio book (over 40 hours of listening – God bless walking and subway commutes, as well as lunchtime walks), but also to reach part four of four of the second book in the century trilogy, Winter of the World. While Book 1 goes over the period of WWI, this second book goes over WWII in every majorly affected country. We learn in great detail how Nazi Germany affected the day to day lives of everyday people, from the methods that were used in hospitals to dispel the country of everyone who was in any way disabled, crippled, or elderly, to the killings of innocent people who merely wanted to speak out loud. It’s like as I am reading this book, I can feel the pain that they are feeling, and when people are beaten to death by the Gestapo or die as civilians during the attack on Pearl Harbor, I become grief-stricken and tear up myself.

The world in which we live is not perfect. It’s quite far from it, especially when events like school shootings become an everyday current event when I look at Google News. But maybe what we live in is not so bad when we realize that the concept of a world war is so foreign to us, and known to us only through textbooks or historical fiction novels like this one. We’re really lucky in a lot of ways that we take for granted. This book reminds me of it.

I’m on the phone with my dad this evening, and in the midst of our conversation, he awkwardly asks, “Are you trying to lose weight?” No, I respond. Why do you ask? He then explains that my cousin in San Jose and his wife came over for dinner with my parents and aunt, and my cousin told my dad that I had a “weight problem” and was trying to lose weight. My dad, in his awkwardly cute and defensive way, exclaims to him, “Yvonne doesn’t have a weight problem! We just saw her last week and she’s still skinny!”

About a month ago, my cousin told me he and his wife were trying to lose weight, as they’d visibly gained a lot of weight together since they got married five years ago. I told him supportively that I also changed my workout habits last year and started reducing my lunch portion size in an effort to get more toned and fit last year. My intention in telling him this was to be supportive and let him know that getting in shape was possible as long as he put in some reasonable effort. However, I’m no longer in that mode anymore, but still am trying to keep up my workout regimen (struggling because of the cold, but hey, we all need a hiatus…). Somehow, that got translated into “Yvonne has a weight problem and is still trying to lose weight.” This is why telling my extended family anything will always get me into trouble.

I’m not sure how you are supposed to act when you are sitting at a dinner table where everyone knows that your brother is gone, but one person doesn’t completely know but seems to think he is just “at work” …or something.

My mom didn’t tell her whole congregation that my brother passed away. In fact, she decided to just tell a select few close friends, who all came to Ed’s service. Her argument was that she didn’t want everyone giving her too much attention and that it would upset her even more. That’s really just code for, “I don’t want to deal with the shame.” The rest of the people in her congregation either do not know, or have heard gossip from “the elders,” and so they do know, but just aren’t allowed to mention it or talk about it openly.

So at dinner last night, I had to sit at a table with someone who frequently offers rides to my mother to and from her Bible study meetings, but he was not informed about what happened to Ed from our family, nor did he attend the service. He also has not acknowledged my brother’s… absence at all. How much more awkward can a dinner table really be?

Ed came to visit yet again in my dreams last night. That marks two nights in one week, which hasn’t happened in a while. Maybe it’s because I finished my evening by reading over half of The Glass Menagerie, and Laura’s awkwardness and inferiority complex further remind me of my brother. Like Tom, Laura’s younger brother, says in the play, he and his mother love Laura because they know her, live with her, and are related to her and know her quirks and different facets. The outside world isn’t as forgiving and patient, and so people won’t really give her as much of a chance to be able to get to know her in the way they do.

Ed and I are sitting in the living room together. He is watching TV on one couch, and I am reading a book on the other. It’s like any other day that I would be at home with him. He seems content. We are coexisting in the home in which we grew up together. We’re not speaking, but we acknowledge each other’s presence and existence silently. When you are really comfortable with someone, that need to always be conversing ceases.

I’m going back home in a week to see my parents. I don’t really care to see anyone else honestly; I’m really just going to see them and a few friends. The rest of my family doesn’t really care anyway. It always feels strange to anticipate going home yet again to a house where my brother once lived but will never be back to again. In the back of mind, when I forget for just a second that he is no longer living, I get excited and think I will get to see and embrace him again. And then the excitement almost immediately is blown out by the cold, depressing knowledge that he is, in fact, dead.

Last night, we went to a magic show that was really awful. Chris wanted us to try seeing something different than the usual off-off or off-broadway theater that we usually see, so he got us tickets to a magic show called “You Will Be Thrilled.” It was scheduled to be 90 minutes, and ended up being only about 40 minutes. The lead was a complete disaster. He didn’t explain anything well, messed up on pretty much all of his “tricks,” and ended the show extremely abruptly. We requested a refund via Eventbrite and got our money back.

Another magic trick happened in my dream last night. I was at home with my mom, and she was saying that she had two children, a son and a daughter, yet her son wasn’t with us anymore. As she said this, I looked across the room, and there was Ed, sitting near our massive CD/DVD collection, organizing them quietly while sitting Indian-style. I ran over to him to hug him, and as he reached out to hug me back, POOF! He disappeared. Right into thin air. He was gone that quickly.

As I retold this dream to Chris this morning, he told me that this seems to be a reoccurring dream for me – my being in some place, seeing Ed and not expecting to see him, and running up to him to embrace him.

Maybe this is his way of reminding me not to forget about him. If it is, boy, is he an idiot. Do you really think I could forget about you, Ed? I think about you every day, constantly. It would be impossible to forget you even though you forgot how much I love you and decided to leave me in this world alone forever.