I guess it makes sense why around the holidays, those who can’t or choose not to spend Thanksgiving and/or Christmas with their family think about their family a lot. Traditionally, if you have left home for school or work or whatever reason, Thanksgiving and Christmas are the one or two times during the year when you will actually travel home for that family time.

It’s sad, though, when you look back at all those family times when you did travel back, and you never really remember being that excited about it, or you can’t seem to recall any Christmas when everyone genuinely seemed happy to be together. We always hear stories about people dreading the holidays because everyone seems to have one or two crazy aunts or cousins who stress everyone else out, but it’s the worst when it’s you who actually has to deal with that.

But how happy can you really get when you are fighting a battle with depression, and all of your emotions seem to be tainted with a deep sadness? What is the happiest state that is possible then? I may never know. I know that when I used to come home, Ed would always be excited, but I have no idea how to rank that on a scale compared to my own “happy scale” when I am happy.

It’s excruciatingly painful when you can’t understand how someone you love feels and sees the world.

I finally decided to make an appointment to see a therapist, so I had my first session yesterday afternoon. It was an interesting session, and not like what some people imagine in their heads. There was no bed to lie down on, and the therapist did not constantly ask, “So how did that make you feel?”

Actually, what it did feel like… it felt like I was verbalizing my family’s long history over the last three generations. These are all the reasons that Ed was who he was, and why I am who I am. I realized while going through each story that every story has multiple backstories; nothing is really simple or clear cut in my family. The reasons why things have happened don’t always make sense, yet in my head, they have always made sense. Saying all of this out loud made me painfully aware of this.

I’ve spent most of my life, even now, holding in a lot of secrets, big and small. Even my closest, best friends don’t even know half the things that I’ve gone through and had to experience. It certainly hasn’t been healthy or rational, but I partly listened to my mom because she always said, “Don’t tell anyone.” The therapist acknowledged how stressful that must be. The truth is that I don’t want to keep secrets anymore; I want everything to be out in the open. The problem there, though, is that if you choose to reveal all these secrets, who are you telling who will genuinely, really care?

We ended the session with discussing how I felt about Ed and if I was angry with him.  I was angry with him in the beginning, but that anger very quickly diminished and became an “I can’t really blame him” feeling. I love my brother, and I completely understand how he felt. No one else knows him like I did. Who knows – if I were in his shoes, maybe I might have done the same thing. I can never know that. No one can. But I know why he did what he did. That’s how scared he was. That’s how depressed he was. And that was how lonely he was.

I made my therapist cry. Maybe I should write a book one day that exposes all of my family’s deep, dark secrets. Maybe then, Ed and I will be fully set free from our demons.

We’re celebrating Thanksgiving early this Saturday. Chris’s brother is visiting from Toronto for the weekend, and my best local friend and her boyfriend are joining us for dinner. We’re going to be traveling in Germany for actual Thanksgiving, and because I can’t get enough of Thanksgiving-type cooking, I insist on having a semi-traditional meal cooked at home every year now before we leave on a trip.

I remember the Thanksgivings when Ed and I were together. Sadly, the last Thanksgiving we actually celebrated together was in November 2003, my senior year of high school before I left for college. Traveling 3,000 miles home for Thanksgiving during college was never an economical idea, and the years after, because my family is religiously broken and no one seems to agree on Thanksgiving and how to celebrate, there remained no reason for me to travel west. So I hosted my orphan Thanksgivings with friends. The two times I did, in 2008 and in 2010, I remember wishing Ed could be there because I knew he was probably having a crummy day with my parents. My cousins and their families had abandoned him. I contemplated flying him out to New York the next time I hosted Thanksgiving, or flying to San Francisco to be with him in the future… that is, before he left me this year. I guess I will never have the opportunity to do any of those things.

I remember how difficult he and my parents used to be during Thanksgiving. Ed never offered to make anything since he wasn’t ever confident in his culinary abilities, but he would always complain about how many dishes there were (he had dish duty; it was only fair). He’d also warn me when I would make food for our cousins’ gatherings because my mom was insistent that we didn’t give my dad the leftovers and tell me that my mom would yell at me if I didn’t set aside food from the platter for my dad first. He had to have the first scoop. Since my mom is a Jehovah’s Witness, she wouldn’t celebrate Thanksgiving, and because my dad felt sorry for her and didn’t want her to be alone, he would eat with her that night while Ed and I went upstairs to celebrate with our cousins. One year, I got yelled at pretty badly just because I brought the stuffing platter upstairs, to then scoop my dad stuffing and bring it down. My mom admonished me severely and said I wasn’t putting my dad first… even though the first thing I did when I got upstairs was to scoop my dad a plate and bring it back down. Apparently, I should have served that before going upstairs. Ed tried to defend me, but of course, he got yelled at, too.

My cousin and his wife would come from Redwood City with macaroni and cheese… because their daughter only ate that. They’d eat the food, say it was good, and then rush back to Vallejo to be with the wife’s side. They’d never offer to help clear the table or wash dishes. That apparently wasn’t their job, even though they’re family.

Ed never has to deal with such petty drama ever again. I’m never going to celebrate Thanksgiving again with people who are ungrateful or nitpick or just think Thanksgiving is stupid.

I’m not a concise person. If you have read this blog or been following me, you will know that I have the tendency to keep going on and on. Word counts always annoyed me. And then because of my anal side, when I do have a word count limit, I spend way too much time trying to edit and cut what I have written.

However, I would think that in my lack of brevity that maybe if I kept going on and on, people might understand me better. They’d be provided with way more examples of why I feel what I feel, and maybe they’d be able to empathize a little bit more.

I think I give people the benefit of the doubt too often because I don’t really think this has happened. I’m still misunderstood.

I was lazy this morning, so I slept in until almost 10:30. So much for being productive on the weekends.

One reason that I’ve felt like sleeping in on the weekends lately is because I know that in dreams, I have a chance of seeing Ed and being with him. That sounds kind of ridiculous because as a living person, I should be maximizing awake-time, but in this world, I know I have no chance of ever seeing him again. In my subconscious when I am asleep, there is always a chance, so that excites me and makes me hopeful that he will come.

Well, he came again this morning. I’m walking on a long, wide street, and I notice him standing in front of a big building across the road. As soon as I see him, I run up to him to embrace him, and I begin sobbing because of how happy I am to see him again. The seconds before I actually get my arms around him feel like they are happening in slow motion; my legs get weak, so every step forward I take seems heavy, and his mouth curling into a smile when he sees me seems like it takes minutes for his smile to form. As we are embracing, he says to me, “Yvonne, I just want you to shine. I’m so sorry I hurt you.” I keep crying during our embrace, and the world seems to fade away.. at least, until I wake up.

Ed, I miss you too much to shine right now. All I feel this week is pain.

A few nights ago, Ed came to me again in a dream. He probably decided to pay me a visit since I’ve been emotionally all over the place this week and thought it might perk me up a bit.

I was going home to San Francisco, and when I opened the door, I saw him sitting in the dining room watching a TV on the table. I ran up to hug him, and as I had my arms around him, I noticed that he was actually watching old home videos of all of his adult birthdays and times when he was receiving gifts. There’s one scene where I am bringing out a huge chocolate cake with a candle on it, and he has a big smile on his face. I asked him where these videos came from and who took them, but he was so mesmerized in watching that he didn’t respond.

The funny thing about this dream is that no home videos exist of us as adults celebrating any of our birthdays. We rarely even took photos unless it was just my taking photos of the cake or the food. In retrospect, I wish I had taken photos of us, but it’s too late now.

In the last few months, it feels as though my awareness to people’s levels of listening, understanding, and empathy has been heightened. My need to observe others taking in what I am saying, doing, and acting has gone up. In general, I’m pretty aware of whether someone loves, hates, or is bored about what I am talking about, but lately, I feel even more sensitive to it.

This isn’t really a good thing because I’ve already become more untrusting of the world and of what people tell me. I’m also not sure whether it means anything when I tell someone something that isn’t positive about my life, and they simply respond, “I’m sorry to hear that.” It sounds too PC, like they want to sound like they care but really just have no idea how to express that (assuming they do).

Ed had a lot of points during his life where he basically thought no one outside of our family cared about him… and thought even people in our extended family didn’t really care (this is probably true of both him and me since our relatives are terrible). Despite his extreme generosity to near strangers, he went through periods where he thought being nice and generous to people just wasn’t really worth it, and he used to tell me this whenever he was thinking about it. I always told him that he shouldn’t look at it that way and he should be kind to everyone, but now, I’m realizing how stupid that sounds. I believe in some form of karma – if you do good things, hopefully at some point, good things will also come to you. But it’s exhausting to be nice to everyone for the sake of being nice. The most important thing is just to be your damn self and to not be phony.

Ed never even knew how to be fake.

I’ve skipped the gym the last two mornings. I feel so unproductive.

The last two days, I’ve felt slightly irritable and just don’t really want to actively do anything… except read about food. I’m not sure if it’s Daylight Savings Time ending or just my moodiness, or just the fact that I was traveling this past weekend, and now, I am not.

Maybe this is about 1/1,000th of what Ed felt. My poor, sweet Ed.

One of the best things about being in the Northeastern part of the United States during the autumn months is seeing the leaves change color. Of course, if you live in Manhattan, it’s easy to miss out on this completely unless you frequent Central Park or Union Square often, but in pretty much every other area, you can’t miss the stunning colors. We spent this past weekend exploring the Cleveland, Ohio, area, and it was far more stunning and dramatic than we had anticipated. The varying shades of red, orange, and yellow were particularly dramatic against today’s cloudy blue sky. It was really any photographer’s dream (or anyone who is leaf-obsessed).

I’m really fortunate that I am able to live in New York given that I was born and raised all the way across the country; I’m even more blessed because I have the luxury of traveling as often as Chris and I do and seeing so many beautiful places and things that really cannot be substituted with a mere Google Image search. The sad part about this is that whenever I feel happy now or excited about something new that I am seeing or doing, I remember that Ed isn’t here to be able to do any of these things. He has never seen the dramatic fall colors in the Northeast; he’s never experienced what it’s like to watch the snow fall from his window and later go outside for a snowball fight; he will never know how great it is to transition from the frigid winter months to the crisp but more promising spring months out here. Bart comes with us, but sometimes, that just doesn’t feel like it’s enough. An empty feeling still lurks in the back of my mind knowing he can no longer breathe the same air as I do.

With the autumn leaves turning and Halloween just having passed us, Christmas is on a lot of our minds now. It’s really crazy to think how the period between Halloween and Christmas zoom by us, and it’s like November is almost a filler month (there’s Thanksgiving, but that even seems to come too quickly).

My cousin texted me earlier this week to ask me and my other cousin (his brother here in New York) if we’d be coming back home for Christmas this year. I will not be going home for Christmas this year. In fact, I won’t even be in this country or this continent for Christmas this year… and if I can help it, any Christmas in the foreseeable future. If Ed is not there, what is my incentive to ever come back home for Christmas ever again?

Christmas is “family time” when your family in some way brings you a degree of happiness and contentment. That is when you look forward to it and just can’t wait to get back to it that one time during the year, assuming you live away from home. But when you have realized after all the years of meaningless hostility, blaming, dysfunction, and lack of gratitude that you actually despise being with them for Christmas, why are you even spending time with these people? As sad as it is to say, I no longer believe that the bonds of family are greater than that of friends. I don’t want to continue to be in touch with a cousin or aunt or whoever *just* because he is of that relation to me. I want to be in contact with him because we enjoy each other’s company and in some way, make each other better human beings for it. As trite as it is, life is too short to be spent with miserable people who make you miserable.

Ed is coming with us to Australia this year. He’s finally going to have a happy Christmas, even if he isn’t in his human form anymore.