Today, I finally signed up for the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention’s Brooklyn Out of the Darkness Walk. It will take place on September 28 near Coney Island this year, and I’ve set $1,000 as my donation goal. I’ve created my own page with my brief story about Ed, and have sent an e-mail out to everyone close and semi-close to me. It’s a modest goal to set, but I figure that it is good to start off small and get bigger as time goes on.

I honestly wasn’t sure how it would be received, yet somehow, just four hours after sending out the e-mails, I’ve managed to reach 40% of my goal, with four different people’s donations other than my own. As I saw the e-mail notifications in my inbox, I immediately felt overwhelmed and could feel myself tearing up. People actually want to support me supporting Ed. Even though it’s somewhat expected since these people are a part of my life, it felt overwhelming anyway — in a good way. It’s strange how even things like this can elicit emotion in me.

While in Brazil last month, I found out via BBC News that the suicide barrier finally received approval from the Golden Gate Bridge board. In the next three years, $76 million will be spent to fund this barrier. It took over 1,600 lives to get this approval to finally happen, and just last year, we saw 46 people jump off this bridge, including Ed. Then this past week, I read that the New York Port Authority is planning to spend $50 million to build a fence to prevent potential suicides on the George Washington Bridge, which connects New York and New Jersey. Last year, this bridge saw 16 people jump off and fall to their deaths.

The thing about the George Washington Bridge is that it’s not one of those iconic tourist spots the way the Golden Gate Bridge is. If you jump off this bridge, it’s very likely that no one will ever witness you jump and fall to your death, and even more likely that your body may never even be recovered. A friend of mine told me that her friend’s friend committed suicide by jumping off the GW bridge. She wasn’t discovered until a week or two later after an exhaustive search to find her when she was reported missing. I already was aggravated when I knew that it took the U.S. Coast Guard an hour to get to Ed. How would I feel if it took them a week or two?

Chris was the one who actually saw the headline in his BBC app while we were in Brazil and showed me his phone. When I read the headline, I felt numb and even slightly defeated. It’s this weird feeling of relief because I know this will save future lives, but a deep sense of hurt came over me knowing that it came too late for Ed.

I’m painfully aware of mental illness and have been for as long as I can remember, and I am also aware that a suicide barrier on any bridge will not 100% prevent suicide from happening. I don’t need some idiot commenting on these articles about the “waste of government dollars” going toward these public projects… because apparently, people who are suicidal need to take care of themselves and take responsibility for their own lives. Why don’t we ask blind people to find their way home? Most of the world’s major bridges have barriers, so it never made sense why arguably the most iconic bridge in the world in my home city didn’t have one. We can’t 100% prevent anything bad from happening. But what we can do is not make it so easy for people to decide to end their lives. We can prevent people from being scarred for life for witnessing people jump to their deaths. We can also stop blaming the victims by saying that if they are determined to die, then they will just find a way to die no matter what we do. We have to help people who need help, give them positive options, take away the ease of access to a quick and relatively painless 4-5-second death, and not make them feel even more helpless and like death is their only option.

I came home tonight to an unexpected card/letter in the mail from a longtime friend and former teacher of mine. The card is made of a light cloth-like material with embroidered flowers, and has this quote on it:

“Let us be grateful to the people who make us happy: they are the charming gardeners who make our souls blossom.”

In it, she tells me of the struggles she has faced emotionally in the last several months, and she acknowledges that she remembers that we’ve reached the one year anniversary of my brother’s passing. She said she thought of me often in the months leading up to it, and especially on the day of. She even remembers how I called her that night one year ago, telling her that he was missing and that I had no idea what to do or who to turn to. Despite my love, my recent engagement, my travel experiences, my friendships, and the generally happy life that I lead, she says, she knows that I am still grieving, and this grieving will never end because of how deeply I cared for Ed. How does one ever get over a life of a loved one, a sibling, cut short, especially when that life is cut short by one’s own choosing?

It’s not every day that I receive traditional mail that is handwritten anymore; actually I almost never do. It was really touching to read her handwritten words to acknowledge remembrance of Ed; I teared up reading it, partly because I was thinking of Ed, and partly because of how grateful I am that I have someone like her in my life who would take the time to write me a letter to acknowledge my sorrow and continuing pain, and to let me know that she does, in fact, remember and care. I’m sure Ed is happy to see this. Ed always did occasionally ask about her. I’m a lucky person despite not physically having him anymore.

I had dinner tonight with an old friend from high school who has spent the summer in New York interning at a law firm. He will be graduating from law school next year and may end up accepting a job here, as well. As we were chatting over pizza in the East Village tonight, I kept thinking how crazy it was that we have known each other for 14 years now, and that just 10 years ago, we graduated from high school together. It’s like every time we see each other, we are aging a teeny, tiny bit more.

On the bus ride uptown afterwards, I thought about why I’ve managed to stay in touch with some people as opposed to others. He mentioned a few people tonight that I did like in high school, people I am actually Facebook friends with, but I don’t actively keep in touch with and vice versa. Some of us tried to keep in touch shortly after high school and somehow drifted, others abruptly stopped responding to e-mails and phone calls, and others seemed to have just disappeared from the face of the earth. I thought about this friend tonight. Why are we still in touch? He is a self-professed cynic, which may or may not be a healthy thing for me to have in my life considering how cynical I have become over the years. Maybe we’re still in touch because there’s some weird understanding we have of each other because we grew up in similar environments at home, and because of that, we can understand each other in a way that gets others befuddled. It’s that feeling that when you share a bad experience you have had with a parent, that this person will look at you, and just by that look, you know he gets it because he’s experienced the same exact thing almost play by play, and he will never, ever say to you, “but he’s still your dad.”

Sometimes, it’s the optimistic people in these situations who really can’t help you.

Today, we arrived in Montreal, and we arranged to have dinner with my cousins’ cousins, one of whom lives in Montreal with their mom, and his brother, who lives right outside of Toronto but just happened to be visiting this weekend. It was a bit of a coincidence, but it was still nice to see them.

I realized after talking with the younger cousin, who is just a year older than me, how much different my life is since we first spoke at length in July 2007, when he stayed upstairs from my parents for a week with his family to attend my cousin’s wedding in San Francisco. At that point in my life, I’d only left the country once to study in China. my knowledge of the world was vastly different than what it is now. Then, I didn’t think much of his accent and didn’t really talk to him much about how he is tri-lingual in French, English, and Cantonese. Since then, I’ve traveled to over half of the states in the U.S. and have been to four other continents. He was asking me about my experiences in Asia and Europe, and I realized that I could actually speak about these things relatively intelligently and not sound naive and wistful about it all the way I would have seven years ago. He told me he still hasn’t left North America but really wants to visit Europe, and I felt a little sad. I know part of the reason he hasn’t left is because of the hold of his mother; I know the way his mom is, and I’m sure she tries her best to control what he does and doesn’t do.

Part of me just wanted to tell him to get the hell out of his house so he could be normal and lead a regular adult life… sort of the way I got out. But I didn’t want to cause any trouble, so I just encouraged him to find a friend to travel with and just book a trip. Maybe he will do it at some point, but hopefully sooner rather than later.

The week has really gone by too quickly, and now, Chris’s two cousins are on a bus, on their way to Newark Airport, where they will connect in Hong Kong and be off to Melbourne and Sydney respectively. It was like they just arrived, and their seven days with us (or rather, me, because Chris was away in London for work for the bulk of their stay) really lasted only seven seconds, and now they are suddenly leaving. I got the same feeling I had when I was saying my good-byes to Chris’s parents when they left in May, which is the same feeling I got in my throat and stomach when my parents and Ed left New York to go back to San Francisco in July 2011. His family becoming my family is only becoming more and more real, and I can feel it in myself every time I see another one of his family members. It’s a very surreal feeling, but a good one, really.

In Chinese culture, it’s the norm for Chinese families and friends to fight over the bill after a meal has ended at a restaurant. The driving force behind it is the idea of “saving face,” or really “having face,” because it shows that you want to take care of the payment and want to treat everyone, and can afford to do it and want to show your care for those people at your table. The frustrating thing about it, though, is that the people fighting over the bill tend to not all want to pay the bill, but they just want to have a big dramatic show of trying to get the bill, even if they don’t want to pay. It sounds very negative, but it’s true. Usually, it’s already been made clear before the meal who pays, but the fight happens anyway.

Well, last night, Chris’s cousins wanted to pay the bill for real, and I wanted to pay the bill for real, so we proceeded to engage in the biggest bill brawl I’ve probably ever personally experienced. We were in close quarters at J.G. Melon on the Upper East Side (where I’m willing to bet NO fight over the bill has ever occurred given the clientele), and we fought like there was no foreseeable end — it resulted it pulling, ripping the bill into two pieces, toppling over of items on the dining table, the waiter coming over to let us know that he had only one copy of the bill, “so please do not destroy it,” and my biting both of them on their arms and fingers.

At least in these dramatic cases, it’s nice to know that all parties fighting all genuinely want to pay the bill. It’s kind of a nice, comforting feeling. But I still won’t let them win. This is when winning does matter.

Over dinner tonight, Chris, his two cousins and I sat in a cozy booth at Beauty and Essex discussing everything and anything. They told us about how they were just in Toronto with Chris’s brother, and how straight faced he was when they were directly asking him when they thought Chris and I would get engaged. He said he reckoned that their cousin and his girlfriend in Singapore would most likely get engaged before us, and they thought nothing of it and thought he was serious with this belief.

They also mentioned that they discussed Chris’s brother’s relationship with me, and he had told them that he looked at me like a sister because of how close we had become and how often we communicated. I suppose I never actively thought about it before, but in that moment, I immediately felt really emotional because I realized how true it was. We really do act like siblings. Even though he is technically four months older than I, I look at him as though he is my younger brother, and we talk and bicker the way brothers and sisters do, but we immediately get over any differences, if there are any, and carry on like nothing has ever happened. He really is like a second brother to me.

Of course, then I thought of Ed, and I felt pain inside. Ed will never get to meet this guy that I call my second brother. Even though that meeting may have been slightly awkward considering how quiet Ed was and how gregarious Ben is, it made me so sad to think that Ed will never get to meet Ben, and Ben will never get to meet Ed. Chris’s parents will never meet Ed; no one in Chris’s family will ever meet him. There are so many moments and experiences and people that he will miss because he left my world this time last year. He’s missed our engagement, and he’s missed us sharing it with everyone we love.

I love Ed and miss him every single day. But I can feel that he would be happy knowing that I have Ben in my life now — certainly not as a replacement of any sort, but as someone extra in my life who will love me in a very similar capacity that he is no longer physically capable of.

Two of Chris’s cousins who live in Melbourne and Sydney are here in New York visiting us for the next week as the last stop on their big North America holiday for the last several weeks. I’ve met them a couple times before in Melbourne around Christmas, but this is their first time visiting us together here in the States.

Everyone on Chris’s side of our family knew that we were engaged except for the two of them, and Chris had purposely planned it this way so that we’d at least be able to tell two people in his family in person about our engagement. Chris’s other cousin and girlfriend were on FaceTime with us when they arrived, so they also got to witness my telling the girls that we were engaged. It was one of those really special moments when there’s so much screaming and laughter and smiles that you know as it is happening that it will be one of the most memorable moments in your life. It was the highlight of our day today, telling them about our engagement (or really, my just saying, “We have news. Guess what?!” and then sticking out my hand with my shiny engagement ring), and since Chris captured it on video, will forever be one of those videos that will get played over and over, and be a captured moment we will never tire of.

After spending the day with them hysterically laughing, being terribly loud and attracting attention everywhere we went because of our crazy volume all together, I realized that they are really like my cousins now. I feel comfortable telling them anything and everything about myself, even to an extent that I may not even share with my own friends. And my own cousins? Forget about it. I’ve finally accepted in mind after many years of struggling that my own cousins, at least the three from my dad’s older brother and wife, and I will never have a functional relationship. They will constantly disappoint me and fall short of my expectations no matter what happens in our respective lives. So it will always be a work in progress for me to just choose to stop taking everything so personally that they say and do (and… don’t do, in the case of not acknowledging or caring about our engagement) and to realize that now, I have new cousins who actually do care to know who I really am and love me and will be ecstatically happy that Chris and I are spending the rest of our lives together. Chris and I are not the only ones happy about this. We have special people in our lives who are happy for us, too.