Chris’s aunt and uncle are staying with us the next few days, and on their first night with us, we spent the evening enjoying Chinese Indian food, wine, and also talking about a lot of different topics, including mental health. It inevitably led to conversations about Ed, his struggles, my family and how they handled my brother’s illness (or, well, chose not to), and just how I have dealt with it the last two decades of my life. And then I learned all these new things about Chris’s aunt, about her own struggles with her family, especially her dad and her brother. Her brother was never able to garner enough of his dad’s approval and love, and despite being very talented and well educated, went through a downward spiral and ended up having electric shock therapy to his brain, similar to lobotomies as what people in those days had because no one understood the concept of depression or mental illness. So he was pretty much rendered useless, like an immobile child who could not function as an adult anymore. He’s now living at the same nursing home that her 100-year-old mother is living at, but neither has any idea that the other is so close. As a result, his aunt has a lot of anger towards her father. Even though he’s 105 years old, he is still critical and unaware of his negative effects on her brother and his life. It’s very similar to how I feel about our father, how he didn’t help and if anything, really made Ed worse. I always wonder if he ever contemplates it when he’s alone. I’ll never know, though, because discussing emotions is off limits with my dad. We realized our similarities in feelings immediately.

They asked me multiple times if I was okay to discuss it and apologized if they were making me feel uncomfortable. It’s never a fun topic that anyone enjoys, but it must be discussed. There are moments when I felt a bit uneasy or tense, but the openness is needed to address the complex feelings and thoughts around this. If anything, I am grateful when people ask me to talk about it all because it means they want to learn and they also want to be heard. And that’s what we need more of in a world that is facing an increasing rate of mental health problems and suicide ideation and risk.

I woke up from a dream this morning that seemed far too ordinary yet again. This time, it was a walk around the block of my parents’ house with my dad. It’s my parents’ “thing” to exercise by walking around our block a few times. This seems extremely mundane, repetitive, and ridiculous when you think about the fact that they literally live across the street from Golden Gate Park, one of the nicest parks in this entire country, but my parents claim they don’t have time to walk all the way across the street to Golden Gate Park for daily walks. They also said that since the avenue above us is a steep hill, the incline helps with their exercise. While that second part may be true, this has always sounded pretty pathetic to me.

My dad and I were walking around the block on this walk. He does this walk every day even when I am home, and I’ve never gone with him, nor have I ever offered to go with him. He’s never asked me to go, either. But for whatever reason, we were walking this boring walk together in this dream, and we were surprisingly having normal father-daughter conversation. When I say “normal,” I mean.. if our relationship were a “normal” father/daughter relationship, which it isn’t. We had a reasonably decent conversation about work and things that were annoying me there. We talked about my friends and their lives. We talked about New York and potentially staying… forever. This conversation was too good to be true, and halfway through the dream, I thought, yes, this is definitely a dream. There is zero way this could be a real walk and a real conversation.

Then, I woke up and confirmed my suspicion. And I also hoped that given how strange this “normal” dream was that nothing bad was waiting for me around the corner in reality.

When planning to fly back to San Francisco, I usually call home the day before. So I left work today, completely drained from a stressful and hectic week of work travel, work drama, and event logistics planning insanity for our annual user conference next week. I felt really cloudy and didn’t want to think about anything. I just wanted to veg out and not do anything productive. So on my walk to the subway, I called the house number, realizing at that hour, my parents would likely not be home. But in the back of my mind, I thought, oh, that’s okay. Maybe Ed will answer, and I can talk to him.

Oh, crap. Ed’s not here anymore. What the hell is wrong with you? 

I hate these moments of complete brain failure when reality hits me, and I actually still think my brother is alive. It still hurts… even after all this time.

Today, we received a phone call from Chris’s cousin to let us know that he and his wife were separating. It was certainly not news I was expecting at all; if anything, I was expecting that he would tell us that they were expecting another child, or there was some big career change move that we would have no idea about. Honestly for me, it was pretty devastating, and I didn’t even know what to say. His wife and I had grown close during our wedding planning periods since our weddings were not too far apart, and we actually learned in spending time together that we had so much in common, everything from our tastes in food and the way we like to travel to our general outlooks on life. We had many Whatsapp texting sessions every now and then, and so it’s hard to believe that now that they are separating that she’s technically no longer “family.”

How do we define “family” anyway, though? Is family just the legal ties, or the blood ties that bond us? Or, is it something less concrete and more fluid than that? She’s still going to be the mother of the child they will continue to share. She’s not the kind of person who would cut any of us off, so what type of relationship are we supposed to have, if any, to her? It’s not as though we live in the same city (or state, or country, or even continent), so it’s not as though we will need to deliberately avoid her or seek her out often.

I just felt so sad today — for them, for their daughter, for us, even. There will be a long road of unknowns coming up very soon.