When I was in middle school, my dad got into gardening, particularly roses, and he bought a few bare-root roses during winter for spring planting. One rose plant that he bought that was not bare-root was in a several-gallon-large container, and its name was Double Delight. It was a hybrid tea rose, meaning single stemmed roses, with a creamy yellowish-white hue tinged with bright magenta on the petal edges. It also has one of the most spectacular fragrances I’d ever smelled in a rose. When you buy your wife a dozen roses from anywhere, the smell is zilch compared to these lovelies. These babies were meant to be grown and loved and cherished in a garden.

Today, it is the only standing rose bush that managed to survive my dad’s brown thumb. I love my dad, but gardening is not his thing even if he tried harder. The last time I was home in February, I thought Double Delight was going to die after looking at how puny and pathetic it looked in the backyard. I felt so disappointed because it was always my favorite plant in the yard. But in the last three months, my mom has managed to bring it back to life. She said she’s been spending a lot of time in the yard taking care of it. My mom loves flowers, especially very fragrant ones. I rarely see a smile on her face as big as when she sees flowers blossoming everywhere. She has a gorgeous blossom from that bush in a vase in our dining room now, and there are five more buds on the way now after I went out to the yard to look at it. How did this happen? I asked her. Before this, the only plants my mom had ever taken care of successfully were the “set it and forget it” type plants like onion, mint, aloe vera, and Vietnamese herbs that just need to be rooted, planted in dirt, watered, and then they thrive on their own like freaking weeds.

Her good friend happens to be a very talented gardener with a tiny garden full of luscious roses of all types, so she taught my mom how to treat the plants, how trim, fertilize, and maintain them. And it worked. This rose bush has never looked healthier. What’s her secret? I asked. At dinner tonight, her friend said to me, “You have to talk to them and give them attention,” she said. “They want to feel loved.”

Well, don’t we all.

I saw some hope in this rose plant this afternoon. I saw how happy my mom was when she was telling me how she came to the rose’s rescue and nurtured it back to health and prosperity. “You don’t know how much time I’ve spent in this yard rescuing it!” she exclaimed as she smelled the blossom in the dining room. Maybe her friend is also in some way helping her heal in her loss of Ed by teaching her a new hobby and passion in the form of gardening. Life is moving forward slowly but surely. Flowers and gardening can’t really replace Ed, but they can help my mom look to the future with a bigger glimmer of hope.

A colleague told me today that her brother-in-law is doing some charity work for a nonprofit called Bring Change 2 Mind, which has the goal of raising awareness about mental illness among American males. She said that she’s noticed a few of my posts on mental illness and suicide and thought I’d be interested in learning about this non profit and the work her brother-in-law does.

It made me smile when she brought this up during conversation. It’s like an acknowledgment that yes, there are people I don’t really think pay attention who do notice things I post publicly, and they actually care that I care to a degree. She said she was interested in getting involved in a nonprofit that was specifically helping the mental health awareness issues because she has a family history of mental illness. I told her I did, too, and when our eyes met, it was pretty clear she knew what I was talking about.

I guess I can’t be that hard on the world. The world is hard on all of us, even those I don’t think have it hard at all. There’s only so much we know about those who surround us every day. It’s hard to know what you can reveal about yourself when, but it’s comforting when people do reveal parts of themselves that they don’t normally do because then they become more real and human to us.

Today, it is Mother’s Day. It doesn’t mean that much for my family or me given that my mom and closest aunt are Jehovah’s Witnesses, so I can’t really wish them a Happy Mother’s Day or send flowers or gifts. But it’s a reminder to me yet again about the hard life my mother has lived and all the pain she’s endured that I only know a fraction of.

She doesn’t celebrate Mother’s Day, but I know she thinks about it. She probably thinks about her life as a mother to Ed and me, and how Ed is no longer with us. I’m sure that hurts a lot to know that you gave birth to and were a mother to your son for over 33 years, and then he took his life by jumping off a bridge. That son is no longer here. He’s dead. I feel a lot of pain when I think about the sequence of events even on the day of and leading to my brother’s death. The more time passes, the less it’s really about pain for myself and my parents as it is for pain for Ed, to think about how he felt, his suffering, and how he just wanted all the pain and agony to end. He just wanted some quiet. When I think of this, I feel even worse and think I could have done more. I get angry at myself because I know I had only spoken to him briefly on the Friday before that Monday, and at length on the Wednesday before that Monday. I knew he was reaching his limit. It’s a terrible thing to feel powerless to help someone you really love. And it’s even worse to think that as a mother, you cannot help your child enough to save him and his life.

Being a mother – what a scary thing. I’m reading Elizabeth’s Warren’s A Fighting Chance now, and I just finished reading Wendy Davis’s memoir. Like they say, being a mother never “ends,” and it rarely gets easier, especially from a emotional level of attachment. Maybe when your child is a teen or a full grown adult, you won’t need to spoon feed him or change his diapers or rock him to sleep, but that doesn’t make him any less your baby. Ed will always be my mom’s baby, just like I am, even if he isn’t physically here anymore.

My mother is clearly on edge because she knows she will be meeting Chris’s parents tonight. I can tell she feels pressured to make a good impression… because she thinks that if she and my dad do anything to offend Chris’s parents, Chris’s parents will then inform Chris that they don’t think this is a good match and force him to end the engagement. That sounds a bit antiquated given that we are in the year 2015, but hey, that’s what my mother thinks. We have to let her think what she thinks.

When I called her after work yesterday, she asked me so many questions that I had to keep a straight face and try to answer all of them patiently so that she wouldn’t yell at me. It went something like this:

Mom: So… is there anything you want to tell me?

Me: No, not really. Everything is fine. Nothing’s new.

Mom: Oh, well, I mean about Chris’s parents.

Me: Oh. What do you want to know?

Mom: Um… who talks more, the mom or the dad?

Me: Dad definitely talks more, but that doesn’t really matter, does it? They both talk! He just talks a lot more than she does!

Mom: Well, I don’t know! That’s why I’m asking. What do they not eat?

Me: They eat pretty much everything. Tony doesn’t really like to eat with his hands, but he can be forced.

Mom: Does that mean he won’t eat crab or lobster?

Me: He’ll eat it if Chris is there.

Mom: What does that mean? Why will he eat it only if Chris is there?

Me: Ugh… He’s just like that! (Note to self: stop telling her things that are too complex and have too much of a silly story behind them).

Mom: I will invite them to come over to the house after dinner. Is that okay?

Me: That’s fine, but it might be a bit late after dinner, and they will be tired and will want to go back to their hotel. It’s out near the airport, remember?

Mom: Well, it’s rude if we don’t invite them to our house. You have to show respect and invite. They came all the way over here. We must at least ask.

Me: I never told you not to invite them! I just mean that if they decline, you shouldn’t be offended.

Mom (voice sounds shrill now): They told you they don’t want to come to our house?

Me: MOM! I never said that!

And so we begin a night of Cantonese dining on the edge of the Richmond district in the lovely City by the Bay tonight, without me.

It’s been an interesting last few days with Chris’s parents. I got to witness a pretty heated debate on our way to Montauk yesterday between Chris and his mother, as they debated “welfare” and who “welfare” really benefits in society, the rich or the poor. I was amused by Chris’s dad’s assumption about my dad regarding his experience being drafted for the Vietnam War. He suggested that because my dad had traveled to Vietnam for the war that perhaps it would have peaked his interest in international travel. The funniest thing about this comment is that it probably did the opposite and only furthered the American superiority complex that so many Americans have. America is so great, right, so why do we need to travel outside of it? Actually, if we had to be more accurate about this, people really think, “my neighborhood/city is so great, so why do I have to leave it?” It’s why Chris and I have been labeled freaks while trying to visit every state in the country.

The greatest thing about being around Chris’s parents is that you can have regular banter about really odd things and opinions, but also have heated debates, and in the end, no grudges are held. This may seem normal to you, but this is not normal to me. I come from a family that is the king of grudges. If you started arguing about politics with my uncle or aunt or anyone in my family, it would likely end in a swearing, name calling shouting match, and people would likely not be on speaking terms after because both sides would think the opposite side was just an uneducated, uninformed moron. People in my family aren’t capable of having healthy debates where once the debate is over, so is all of the potential yelling or arguing; they only end in sourness and insults. I’m still getting used to this, and this family still isn’t real to me. It’s like I’m waiting for something scary and ugly to come out, but it never comes out. I try to embrace it while I continue to pinch myself and convince myself that it’s all real.

This morning, I went to another mentoring session with my K-8 school in Harlem. Because there was some misunderstanding with the kids regarding today’s session, most did not show up, resulting in approximately two mentors being paired up with one mentee for activities today. Another mentor and I sat with a girl as we discussed goal setting. She shared a notebook with us of a story she had begun to write. The story started with “Once upon a time…” and included some drawings.

As I’m looking at her writing and smiling at her misspellings, I suddenly remembered an “assignment” my mom would give me in my first few years of kindergarten through elementary school. When I first began writing, my mom encouraged me to read and write as much as possible. Because she worked full time, I wouldn’t see her until she’d come home from work around 6pm. At the beginning of the day, she’d walk me to school and drop me off, and she’d remind me about what she expected of me when she came home from work. She said that in my notebook, I had to write her a story, with a beginning, middle, and end, and that she looked forward to reading it when she came back. When this first began, I literally would write silly things like, “Once upon a time, there was a girl with long pigtails. She had a cute dog she played with. And they lived happily ever after in the fields of roses.” Well, I guess I had to start somewhere. I was just 5 then. But as the years went on through the end of elementary school when I was 10, these writings would evolve into full blown stories with complicated plots and surprising endings, and the length would be in excess of ten to fifteen pages on 8″ x 11.5″ binder paper. In third grade, I started sharing these stories with my classmates and teacher, and during silent reading time, the kids would fight over my stapled binder paper stories. Once, a story got torn up in the fight. Our teacher had to get involved to stop it.

I guess this is where my love of writing began, and it’s also how I started developing these really long sentence structures that the average person never writes in. My sixth grade English teacher was the first person to say this to me, that I have a gift of expression and a gift of writing. How do you know when you are different or have any type of talent? Someone usually needs to point this out to you. Some idiot I once met told me that my sentences were run-ons because they were so long. I responded back that I don’t even know how to write a run-on sentence, and that there’s nothing “run-on” about my sentences; they are just complex, unlike him. I never even realized how different my writing was from the average person until around 6th grade, when I read someone else’s writing in a peer review. And I thought their sentences and general expression were crap and completely inferior to my own. I guess that’s also when I started becoming a more confident person. 🙂

What struck me during this mentoring session, though, was how after all this time, I had completely forgotten about this “assignment” my mom gave me. I had a weird moment looking over this girl’s notebook and remembering my past. I usually pride myself on remembering these types of details. “When I was your age,” I thought to myself, “I was writing crazy stories to entertain my class.”

I recently started following the Suicide Shatters page on Facebook, and today, I saw this article written by Kristina Cowan, who has experienced the death of immediate family twice in her life, the first was her mother’s to cancer, the second was her brother’s to suicide. She quotes a line from Dr. Maxine Harris’s book, The Loss That Is Forever: The Lifelong Impact of the Early Death of a Mother or Father. : “[I]t only takes one shattering event of sufficient magnitude to change one’s core beliefs about life.”

In Cowan’s own words, she writes, “They’ve changed my beliefs — for the better. I’ve learned not to ask why bad things happen, but how to cope well with such bad things, and turn them into something glorious. For me that means when I remember my brother, I’m challenged to love the people around me better, to forgive faster than I’m inclined, and to be kind when I’d rather not.” I understand and feel a lot of what she feels. I have always been a kind person, but now I’m even kinder to people, especially strangers… even the ones who bump into me on the street. But at the same time, I think I am far less tolerant of a lot of things: lack of empathy and compassion, arrogance without something concrete to back it up, and even things like people interrupting me or each other in group settings. I’m less patient with complaining and irrational worry, and I’m also far more critical of day to day superficiality that people seem to love to discuss and fill their lives with. Example: the other day, a colleague gave me a really hard time for not remembering the name of some famous actor (apparently it was Jared Leto). She said, “Yvonne, really? How can you not know this?” Chances are that someone who says something like this is probably really catty and gossipy in real life with her own friends, and she’s not someone I’d want to waste my breath on at work. I simply responded that I don’t really focus on celebrities and their lives in my free time. She got the message… At least, I think she did. And I’m sure she also wrote some nasty instant messages about me after. I really can’t be bothered by people’s stupidities and shallowness. Some might find this narrow minded of me, but I don’t want that kind of life. There’s an art to not giving a shit. It’s important to judge people not by isolated comments or conversations, but as a whole person. And she as a whole person is not appealing to me.

Tonight, I was invited to attend the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention’s first appreciation event for top fundraisers. The group was far bigger than I thought it would be — there were at least 30 people who attended, a mix of fundraisers/walkers, board members, and junior board members of the New York City chapter across all five boroughs. I spoke with a number of fundraisers and board members, and it was a great feeling to be part of a group of people who were clearly passionate about the cause we’re all supporting. One junior board member I spoke with had lost her aunt, who was also her godmother, to suicide a year ago. Another fundraiser, whose first name I recognized from the top fundraisers list last year, had lost her little brother to suicide in December 2013, just five months after Ed passed away. Talking to her hit very close to home for me. Even though Ed was really my older brother, in so many ways, he felt like my younger brother. He never had a real opportunity to grow up to be a mature adult. It wasn’t his fault, though.

She talked about the pain and shock she experienced when she learned her brother had died, and she said that she began seeing a therapist about a year after his suicide. She was diagnosed with “complicated grief,” which is a condition in which a person has lost someone close to her to death, but the survivor struggles to grapple with the death, which results in time moving on, but the survivor not. I had no idea this was even a condition one could be diagnosed with.

One thing she said really resonated with me — she was so angry afterwards when some of her own family and friends just withdrew from her. It’s as though as soon as they knew her brother died and it was because of suicide that they decided to just ignore her, some for over a year. That made me so angry. I could actually feel pain seep through me when she said this, and I could see the hurt on her face as she described the whole experience. “I get that people don’t always know how to respond when someone has died, especially when it’s something as sensitive as suicide,” she said. “I was like that for a long time before my brother died. But sometimes, it doesn’t really matter what you say or do as long as you say or do something. Just show that you are there and care.” She said that after that experience, she realized who her real friends were and who really cared, and she just separated herself from the ones who turned away from her. It’s so interesting how similar this is to my own experience and how I changed my own outlook on people after that.

Exchanging experiences with her was emotional for me, as many moments I held back tears listening to her speak about how isolated and alone she felt, and how she felt like she could never really be herself ever again. I still feel moments throughout every day since Ed has passed when I feel like no one really understands me or what I’ve gone through, not just because of Ed’s suicide, but because of all the experiences in our lives that led up to that hellish moment he jumped off that bridge. Everyone seems to think it’s all about his suicide. If he were still here and struggling, no one would pay me any attention. And even worse, no one would pay him any attention, as they did up until the point he died. We all know this is true as awful as it is to write it out. When you have someone very close to you experience mental illness and/or suicide, the way you view the world is completely different. There’s a completely different level of empathy you have for what others’ experiences are and how they perceive the rest of the universe. There’s little that can accurately describe it. Every day is a different type of hurt. But at least it’s a small comfort to know there are other people who care enough to share their own experiences and support a cause they believe in.