Last year, Chris’s younger brother quit his job and left Toronto to move back to Australia. But before he did that, he spent about two months traveling around Southeast and South Asia, exploring areas that I haven’t been to yet, including Nepal, India, and the country side of Malaysia.

Is it sad that the first thing I think of when someone quits their job to go travel for an extended period of time is health insurance? What will they do for health insurance? What will they do if something happens to them, God forbid? Oh, wait. Ben is an Australian citizen. Australia has universal healthcare. He doesn’t have to worry about what happens to him because job or no job, he has health insurance fully covered.

Even with Obamacare now, it’s scary to think about not having a job and relying on the broken system that we have now. I just can’t understand people who don’t think that the right to life also means the right to healthcare, because without health, what do we have? We don’t really have a life, do we? The concerns that plague us as young Americans aren’t even thoughts at all in the minds of people in Canada and Australia, who don’t have to worry about these same senseless things. I thought about this when a client told me her colleague left the company to travel Thailand for a third of the year. Maybe she didn’t get health insurance and just winged it. Let life take its course!

I’m too much of a thinker to be that spontaneous, though.

How do people continue to fund raise for the same cause year after year? How do they sustain donor attention and donor support from the same people in their circles?

I’ve realized that a lot of the donations I’ve gotten for the AFSP donor drive are from people who are new to me, mainly colleagues that have started within the last year, after I did my first Out of the Darkness walk, who would not otherwise know my story about my brother. Three of my colleagues were incredibly generous and donated $100 each; I was so shocked and touched at the same time. But would they still donate next year, or the year after that, and the year after that? My story will evolve every year, but how do I keep people understanding that this is not just a one-time effort to get attention, that I really believe in what I am fund raising for, and that I believe we as human beings have a bigger purpose in this life other than just earning money and earning a living and simply existing?

I don’t know how to answer that. I just have to ignore the people who ignore my cause, otherwise my cynicism will grow, which is exactly what I don’t want. My level of cynicism should either stay the same or go down. Otherwise, Ed will probably be pissed at me.

Today marks the 70th anniversary of the world’s first atomic bomb being dropped on Hiroshima, Japan. On the sixth of August every year, people in Hiroshima gather at the Peace Memorial Park to mourn those who died as a result of “Little Boy.” Most of the major news publications posted articles with coverage from Hiroshima, as well as reminders of what actually happened. I was listening to a BBC podcast discussing those who were comparing coverage of the Hiroshima bombing around that very time seventy years ago, and they noted how the U.S. government refused to show photo or video coverage of the actual victims who affected and/or died during the bombing; they would only show remains of buildings, as though the bombing killed no one. It removed all humanness from the bombing, and none of the photos or details of the effects of the people were released until the 1980s in the U.S. As someone who has had the privilege to visit Hiroshima recently and actually visit the museum that has extremely detailed photos and documentation from the bombing, I felt so angry being reminded of this.

The BBC News podcast I listened to also mentioned a survivor of the bombing who has traveled to the U.S. to speak out about the atrocity and continued effects on the few remaining survivors to this day. She is now in her late 80s, but she says she feels compelled to continue speaking about the event publicly so that people remain aware… because if she doesn’t do it, who else will?

Oddly, it made me think about my American Prevention for Suicide Prevention donor drive that I am doing for the second time this year in honor of Ed. Last year, I was so overwhelmed in the beginning with the outpouring of support I received, even from those I didn’t even think would care, in the form of words and extremely generous donations. This year, I sent out an email with my story to those who had already donated last year, as well as a subset of my colleagues. The donations have been slow to trickle in, which made me feel disappointed. Is it because I already did this last year, and so therefore it’s not as touching or “new” to people? Are they going to get tired thinking, is she really going to do this every year, and does she really expect us to donate every single year?

Cynically, then I thought, it’s like the way Ed’s passing was handled. In the beginning, everyone seemed, at least superficially, concerned and like they wanted to be supportive. But as time went on, the care and the compassion little by little started to diminish. It’s back to the regular ways of life. Forget that ever happened! Back to normal! Well, perhaps back to normal for you, but it will never be back to “normal” for me. It’s grabbed everyone’s attention in the beginning, but we live in a society of short attention spans. Everyone cares… for just a little bit. And then, they either slow it down or just stop completely. But why can’t more of us have the attitude of that 80-something-year-old atom bomb survivor in Hiroshima? She works and continues doing what she does because she wants people to be aware. She doesn’t want the awareness to die. So what’s wrong with the rest of us? It’s just too much work, or too hard, right, or so the excuses go?

These are the moments I lose faith in society and those people around me, even the ones who say they love me and care about me. If you care about me, you care about the causes I care about — maybe not as deeply, but at least the core goal of them and what they are trying to achieve. If you don’t, then what are you trying to do and achieve in your life that is so much more important or better?

The air conditioner in our living room died today. The odd thing was that I didn’t even realize it — Chris did. He notified our super about this, who will look into this tomorrow, but as I realized that the air was not cool while preparing dinner this afternoon, I thought about the couple of years I lived in that third floor Elmhurst apartment and didn’t have an AC until my landlord gave me the one his former tenant left behind. I can’t even believe I somehow managed to sleep with just a fan blowing on me for two summers.

I guess that’s what you do when you are young, don’t think you make that much money, and are cheap: you think you can “tough” it out without “luxuries” like air conditioners, and you deal with crappy fans and somehow think you are better for it. You’ll save money by not buying an air conditioner! Your electricity bill won’t go up! You don’t need all that, right? In retrospect, I regret being so cheap and pathetic. I never had a low income while living in New York. I was always able to live comfortably and do what I wanted. I could have been more comfortable all those summer nights and not have woken up dripping in my own sweat, feeling like I was sleeping in an oven.

Life is short. You should live comfortably and at least allow yourself a comfortable night’s sleep. It’s the least you owe yourself.

I can’t believe it. Today is my dad’s 67th birthday. I don’t know about you, but 67 sounds kind of old. When I’m around my dad, he doesn’t seem 67 to me; he seems much younger. His voice is still as strong as it’s always been. His grip is like a 20-something-year-old’s. He has a lot of childlike qualities, for better or for worse. His hobbies include model railroad and caring for tropical fish. He has boxes and boxes of unopened model railroad parts all over the basement, and two large tanks of tropical fish that he’s still adding to. He can spend hours tinkering with all of these things. Maybe it might seem like a 67-year-old’s hobby to some, but when I watch my dad taking care of these things, he doesn’t seem that old at all. He seems like a little kid in a big person’s body, wondering how he got to be this age and this old. Where did most of his hair go, and how did he get those wrinkles on his face? How did he get married and raise two children with his wife, and have to go through the untimely death of his first born?

It’s hard to watch our parents grow old because we know that inevitably, they will not live forever and will die like the rest of us. Each birthday of my dad’s that passes now, as awful as it sounds, the first thing I think about is that it’s another birthday that my brother never lived to see, whether he wanted to see it or not.

To more and more of my dad’s birthdays that Ed will not see.

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.