Today, I met a friend for lunch at Sweet Green. She’s here on a short trip from Seattle, where she and her boyfriend are currently living. Since she left New York in 2012, I see her only about once a year when she is back in the city to visit family and friends, and her schedule is always so tight. I rarely have more than an hour or so with her because there are too many people to see in too short of a time.

It made me think about how as we get older, it’s almost like we feel we have less and less time. Some things are more real, like a woman’s actual internal clock for having a baby, but other things are more around social things, like how much time do we have to spend with friends and family, especially those who don’t live near us when we are all together? We always think about maximizing time with people we love because without love and friendship and relationships in general, we have nothing. But it gets harder and harder when there are people you have to split time up for, and what if you say you will meet ‘next time,’ but next time never comes?

It’s like that time in September 2013 when I came home shortly after Ed passed away, and I was insistent that my parents and I eat dinner with my dad’s good friend Bob. They were arguing over who was going to pay the bill — in other words, over stupid, petty things, and I said to both sides, what if we never have the chance to do this ever again? My parents didn’t care. Typical them. They said, forget it. Bob caved in and said, okay, I thought about what you said. I’ll come and your parents can pay. Well, we never had the opportunity to have a meal together again after that one meal in September because that following November, Bob died suddenly. It was all over. And now, we have that last meal as our last memory all together.

He didn’t come for a visit last night.

That is just so typical of siblings. They never readily do what you ask them to do.

I did sleep quite soundly last night, though. I guess sometimes, when you are lamenting the past and cursing those who have wronged you, it exhausts you to a point where you just fall asleep right away.

Sometimes when I am walking, especially when I am by myself, I look up at the sky and the shining light, and I wonder if he’s actually watching me. He could be hanging out with God or some other higher power, chilling in the clouds, looking down on me and my self-pity for having lost him, and wondering when that part of my mind will move on.

“I’m not sure if losing a parent to death is the same as the lost that you have experienced with your brother. It’s hard to say, isn’t it?” A friend said to me last year around the anniversary of Ed’s passing. All loss to death is painful, whether it’s to old age, cancer, murder, or suicide. But there are some pains that leave more loose ends, and those loose ends can have different damaging effects on people. With old age, I think eventually it’s healthy to accept the cycle of life, that when you are old, you must die, and then be replaced by babies who will eventually become adults, grow old, and die, as well. You never lose the sentiments, but it’s more an acceptance that life must go on, and in order for it to truly go on, the elderly must die.

Murders and suicides are hard, though. They are untimely deaths, deaths caused by events and feelings that are out of our control. In my head, I group them together because I think that these are things that legitimately, people can never fully move on from. The pain just stings too hard because there’s a lack of understanding of why or how and why these particular individuals? What drives someone to kill someone else? What drives a person to want to end his own life? However, it is sad to me that while the rate of homicide has significantly decreased over the last 50 years in the U.S., the rate of suicide has remained the same, and little is being done about it.

I’m so saddened thinking about it. I have nothing left to say.

Every year as we approach the anniversary of my brother’s passing, I find myself reading Bible scripture. I told myself when he died that one day in the near future, I would have myself sit down and read the Bible as a piece of literature, cover to cover, Old Testament and New Testament. I would do this for him. He always wanted me to convert ever since he converted to Christianity in 2000. We pretty much grew up with a lot of Christian values and read a lot of Bible stories as kids, but we never really went to church growing up. After he passed and I was settling his estate with his State Farm agent, who was also a friend of his through his church, she told me he had communicated many times with her that one of his greatest wishes was for me to convert and devote my life to Jesus. I never fully agreed, but I did acknowledge that of the religions I had studied, Christianity in its most modern form made the most sense to me.

I have two copies of the Bible. One is the copy my brother bought for me and sent me off to college with in August 2004. He instructed me to open it from time to time and read it when I was troubled or wanted to think. The second copy is one of his. After he died, I found that he had two copies of the NIV Bible. I put one copy in his niche at the Columbarium and took the other back with me to New York.

There are many comforting words in the Bible, and many words that can be interpreted in many ways to mean many things. But I do agree and believe in what the Bible says about love. Love never fails. Without love, we are and have nothing. I hope when Ed died, he knew that he had my love even when I was far away. Now, we are physically even farther from each other, but oddly, sometimes, I feel even closer to him now.

On Father’s Day a few weeks ago, my Facebook feed, as it is every year, was flooded with “Happy Father’s Day” messages from Facebook friends, lots of father-child photos, and even a few tear-jerker posts. One post really stood out to me a lot. It was from a former high school classmate who I know has been constantly traveling since she was young. The only reason I know this is because she posts occasional photos from her travels on Facebook, and in her posts, she references her constant travel since her youth. Her post was very frank. She mentioned how pissy she was to her dad throughout her years, and she ended it by saying that she was blessed to do all this travel because it was “bank rolled by the savings of a man who lives frugally every day, wakes up at 4:30am for work for the past 20-plus years, and wanted his daughter to see more than he ever can.” I almost started tearing up when I read this.

A lot of people like to say that they want to hear about other people’s experiences particularly around travel so that they can live vicariously through them. But it is the most touching when it comes from someone who has actually sacrificed a lot for you and literally is, every day, living vicariously through you and your experiences because they just never got the chance to. I thought about my own dad as I reflected on this woman’s post, and I thought about all the things I’ve shared with him over the years, whether it was my good and bad moments in college, an experience he never fully got himself, or travel through Asia or Europe. There are things my dad’s taught me through the years, but as I am an adult now living and breathing experiences he will never have, it’s almost like it’s my turn to teach and educate him now.