Category Archives: Love

Three

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Dear Ed,

Today marks three years since you left us. Every year when we begin approaching the anniversary of your escape, I always feel an agonizing feeling inside my stomach and wonder if you will come back for a visit. Well, this year, I am not as naive. This year, I didn’t expect you to come visit on your anniversary in my dreams. This year, I was stronger than the last two years, and I knew I could get by without seeing you again. But that doesn’t mean I don’t feel as miserable.

This year has been an emotional year for me. Chris and I had our wedding in March; in fact, I saw you when I walked down the steps to the aisle. You were there. No one else saw you. But I did; you were staring right at me and smiling, just like I thought you’d be. We did all these things to get you to come: we named the tables after your favorite foods, we had photos of us together around the venue; we put your name on our wedding program. Chris even gave a speech and talked about how important you were to me, to us, and how much we missed you that day. It brought tears to my eyes and to all three of my bridesmaids’, my childhood friends that you saw all the time when we were growing up together. There was some surprise regarding how much you were in the wedding, but I didn’t really want it to be a surprise. I wanted every single person to know that I’m painfully aware that you’re no longer part of this life physically, but you will always be in my life — in my head and in my heart. I miss you more than anyone could possibly imagine, and I don’t want you to think that on what is supposed to be the biggest day of my life that I had forgotten about you for even a second.

This year is an election year, and a scary one at that. Donald Trump could end up being our president, and that is absolutely terrifying to me. Sometimes, I slip back into my cynical thinking and I think that the world is going to be a worse place, especially if he ends up getting elected. But then I am quickly reminded that if I keep thinking negatively, I will do you and your memory a disservice. I need to be strong, even when it’s hard, for you. I need to work my hardest to prove to you that life is worth living, that the world is going to be better place in the future for the future children of the world. You know what I want? I want the world to become a better place so that you can look down on us and think, “Man, I wanted out on that? What was I thinking?!” We have a lot of work to do to get there, though.

I don’t want to upset you, but our dad didn’t say anything about the anniversary of your passing as I expected; he never has, and he probably never will. He’s too out of touch with human emotion to be able to do that with me or anyone. Some people and things will never change, sadly. Our mom is picking fights with me about Chris and his family since the wedding, but you probably already predicted yourself that would happen; you probably know our mother better than I do.

When I look back at our time together, I have many regrets… as useless as they are. But one regret I have that I always get reminded of every year is that we didn’t spend your last Christmas together. Under my bed in our tiny apartment here in Manhattan, I still have the collection of ornaments that you and I collected, and many that you so generously bought for me (70-80 percent off at Macy’s after Christmas, no less!). What I want to do is to have our own Christmas tree to hang up all these ornaments, and it would be an ode to you and how much you loved Christmas and everything about it. That home we shared never truly embraced Christmas, but you always looked forward to that time of year anyway. It would be amazing for us to have one more Christmas together, just us, away from the dysfunctional and maddening family we share. You would no doubt drive me crazy with your obsessive compulsive ways and your lack of desire to wash dishes or clean, but I’d suck it up since I haven’t seen you in too long.

There have been a lot of times in the last three years when I wanted to take a break from reality, pause it all, and just come hang out with you. That sounds ridiculous and is clearly impossible, but it doesn’t mean I don’t wish it could happen. I promise I wouldn’t complain about our mother to you, and I also promise that I wouldn’t try to beg you to come back. I just wish I could see you again. I know it’s selfish, but I occasionally find myself envious when I hear about my friends or my colleagues spending time with their siblings like it’s no big deal. I feel even more hurt when they express how close they are to their brother or sister. It shouldn’t be a big deal, but it is to me because I no longer have that option anymore.

A number of colleagues and friends, after learning about your passing and how it happened, tell me they’d like to chat with me about it sometime. For the most part, it doesn’t happen. In the beginning, because it was so new and still raw for me, I didn’t always answer the question of “how” directly, either. It was too much at the time. But as time has gone on, I’m more comfortable talking about it to reduce the stigma around it and to help other people understand what they may not want to or be able to understand. Now, I’ve realized that I’m not really creating the problem; the people who want to know but fear knowing are adding to the problem. I would love to openly tell anyone about this in an effort to potentially help someone else’s life, but so many people are scared. They are scared of my getting hurt (I’m not), they are scared of understanding, and they are probably scared of how they will react. I would love for the day when people would cut the bullshit and just ask what they want to ask and listen — truly listen and not just listen for the moment and move on to the next idea. I’d love for them to listen, digest what they’ve heard, and see how they could apply this knowledge to their lives potentially in the future. I’m sitting here waiting for that to happen.

Well, I decided to do a few things for you to remember you this weekend. I’m making one of your favorite soups — West Lake beef soup. I even made my own stock, used the egg whites, and everything. I’m also making Chinese sticky rice, and contrary to what our grandma used to do, I’m stuffing it like crazy with meat and seafood filling, so the ratio of filling to sticky rice is almost 1:1. I’m sure you would have enjoyed this. If you were here, I also wouldn’t have made you wash the dishes since I know you hate that.

It’s time for me to say goodbye for now. I’ve never really said goodbye to you because it’s too hard for me to say. I couldn’t even say it to you when they closed your casket, and I couldn’t see your face in the flesh again. I couldn’t even be there when they closed it because it was too hard for me that day. I hope you aren’t upset by that.

Each night, I still wait for you to visit. You only really come about once a month now, but that’s okay. You can do whatever you want now since you’re free. You’ve escaped. I won’t see you again here, but just like that Puff Daddy (or P. Diddy now as he’s known) song, “On that morning / When this life is over / I know / I’ll see your face.”

Hope you will be patient with me for that moment because there’s a lot of things I need to do in this life before it’s over. Until then, I’ll see you in my dreams… because that’s all I can really hope for. Love you.

Love,

your hopeful sister Yvonne

One week visit home

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Last night, I dreamt I went home again, and this time surprisingly, Ed was there. My scheduled visit was for one week, and when I realized Ed was home, I was so happy to be there for a full week and wanted to soak it all in… except, he didn’t really feel the same way. He was being moody and negative the entire week, making passive aggressive comments here, snapping at me over there. It was not fun at all.

When it came to the seventh day and I was packing my bag to leave, he said to me, “You must be really happy to be going back to New York.”

I was furious and let him have it. “Happy to be going back to New York? Happy to be going back to New York? I spent an entire week here with you, and you were being negative and annoying the entire time!” I yelled. “And now, I won’t be able to see you ever again! We wasted an entire week together!”

He was quiet for a moment and wrinkled his brow. Clearly, he felt confused. “What do you mean you’ll never see me again?”

My frustration was growing and growing. “What do I mean? I’m never going to see you again BECAUSE YOU ARE DEAD! You aren’t even alive! You aren’t even really here right now!!”

It was as though someone hit him over the head, and he finally understood the situation. He really wasn’t alive. He wasn’t human. He was just a spirit visitor pretending to be one of us. He perked up for a bit and said, “Okay, why don’t we go out together now, then?”

“Okay,” I responded. At least we could have an hour together alone and being seemingly normal without the watchful eye of our parents. And together, we left the house.

We’re almost at the three-year mark of his passing. He always manages to come back around this time, as though he thought that somehow, I’d manage to forget. Little does he know that I’ve never forgotten — in fact, that’s quite impossible, and not a day goes by when I don’t think about him and his eternal absence in my life. It doesn’t really matter where in the world I go or what current events are happening or what people I meet or how I may choose to ‘escape’ my reality — he’s always there in the shadows of my mind.

Presents from Paris

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Chris came back from his week-long trip to France and surprised me with Jean-Ives Bordier butter, the famous butter churned in the Brittany region of France that is known for extremely high butter fat (well, all of France is known for that), grass-fed cow cream (resulting in yellower butter), and inventive flavorings. Last October when we went, I packed gallon-size ziplock bags and foil in anticipation of purchasing these special butters and bringing them back home, and it was so worth it. When we tasted these on bread, it was life-changing; the quality of the butter was unmistakable, and the taste could not be compared to anything I’d had here before. This time, Chris brought back five different flavors: smoked salt, which I’d loved and bought the first time, citrus olive oil, seaweed (or algae), espelette chili, and buckwheat. It will be a challenge to figure out how to use each of these, but I suppose the first step would be just to taste them on good bread. The buckwheat butter is especially strange, as the only thing I could think of doing with it would be to top it on pancakes or spread it on muffins.

From others’ views

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It’s been fun and interesting to hear about the wedding from our family and friends’ perspectives. I haven’t had a chance to speak with everyone yet, but the more I talk to them, the more I laugh about things that they have told me. When it’s your own wedding, you can never be aware of every little thing happening around you.

One thing I had no idea about that I learned of tonight during a Google Hangout session with two of my bridesmaids was that during the ceremony when Chris and I were giving our personal vows that we wrote, the girls said that almost every female in the audience was tearing up and dabbing their eyes, and even a handful of males were. All three of my bridesmaids were getting emotional and trying hard to keep it in, with two of them sniffling the whole time. And during Chris’s speech at the reception, when he revealed the meaning behind the table names and Ed’s symbolism, one of them cried almost the whole time. These are all the things I had no idea about because I couldn’t see them myself.

We just got back our full set of professional photos, and I didn’t really see any of this represented, which concerned me a little. It would be great if we could see this documented via photography and would be sad if it were nowhere. We banned photography from the ceremony in hopes that it would help make everyone more present  and in the moment, and so that the photographers wouldn’t have any distractions.

Matron of honor speech

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We just received the short wedding teaser video from our videographer today, and I teared up listening to the part where my matron of honor is giving her speech and talking about how strong Chris and I both are. She’s a woman of few vocal opinions, positive or negative, so it’s always so striking to me every time she shares something, especially when it is a compliment of me.

I’ve oftentimes thought that through the years, maybe the real reason that we’ve held onto each other as friends despite many differing opinions is because we just like holding onto something that is old and from our past, even if we don’t always mesh that well. It’s nice to have someone stick with you throughout your life, right? But I’ve realized in these moments that it’s not that simple or lazy. It’s actually because we truly care about each other, love each other, and like family, want what is best for each other, however “best” is defined by each person.

Wedding ceremony details

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There’s nothing worse than a long, boring wedding ceremony. The most boring wedding ceremony I had to attend was over three hours long and had way too many meaningless readings done that meant absolutely nothing. It was clear it was like a template that brides and grooms were blindly following. We agreed on thirty minutes max, twenty if we could possibly pull that off, and tried to abide by that and squeeze in a solo by my bridesmaid, a reading from a bridesmaid and a reading from a groomsman, our own personalized vows, and a unity ceremony in the form of a poured cocktail. I think we made it work.

During Chris’s vows, he surprised me with a quote that I did not recognize but did sound vaguely familiar. Who said this quote? He pulled out a Pooh bear from under the unity ceremony table. I love Pooh and was so excited. I knew he’d do something to surprise me at some point during the wedding, and this was it.

We wanted some visual for a unity ceremony toward the end of the ceremony, and we knew a candle would be too boring and trite, and a sand ceremony just seemed pointless because we’d need to carry that back to New York or give it away, which would defeat the purpose of having it. We both like cocktails, Chris said. So why don’t we just get some drinking vessels, pour our own into a single glass, and drink out of it to symbolize our union? It was an idea that amused so many of our guests, and some complained that they didn’t get a taste of it afterwards to see what we decided to mix. Of course, I chose tequila as the liquor of choice.

The readings were done really well — the one by my bridesmaid was chosen by herself, Sonnet XVII of Pablo Neruda, to reflect our bond and love, and the one by Chris’s cousin and groomsman, “If” by Rudyard Kipling, was to mark the next stage of our lives as adults. “If” is Chris’s favorite poem, and I’ve always loved the writings of Pablo Neruda both for his poetry as well as his novels. And the song that Crista sang, “Your Song,” was so beautifully delivered that it made me tear up when she was singing. She definitely put her own spin on the song that is unique from Elton John’s.

Ed was at the wedding. You just had to look and listen for him.

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“Table numbers are so boring. I want table names,” Chris said to me ages ago. Okay, I said, but you have to come up with a theme that makes sense. A few weeks ago, he asked me questions about what Ed’s favorite foods were. A few that came up off the top of my head included pork ribs, dim sum, mango mousse, and rocky road ice cream. Think up a few more, Chris said. I also thought up Gordo’s burritos (a mini chain of San Francisco style burritos back home), Funyun chips (our favorite junk food purchase at the corner store near our house growing up), Jamba Juice (in particular, the berry smoothies), and fried chicken. “Let’s have the table names be Ed’s favorite foods,” Chris said. “Not everyone will know right away what it’s about, but I’ll tell everyone during my reception speech.”

I immediately started crying when he said this. I felt like it would be another reminder for my mom and me that Ed wasn’t there, but Chris was insistent. “It’s a way to remember him and make him there at the wedding,” he reassured me. “It’s a good idea.” So I reluctantly agreed. And then after having the table names printed along with photos to accompany what each was, I decided that this would be a really fun and cute idea for our quirky wedding.

(What we later found out from discussing the wedding with guests is that some thought that the name of their tables was the only food they’d be getting for the evening. The “Pork Ribs” table wondered if they’d all be eating pork ribs, and the Dim Sum table thought they’d only be choosing from different bamboo baskets during the dinner reception. Boy were they in for a surprise!).

Ed was all over the wedding. He was sitting at the ceremony in my good friend Adam’s pocket on the ocean terrace. When Adam was manning our welcome table, little Bart was there with him, too, and apparently was handed off to a few other friends who took his photo in different wedding venue spots. I had photos of Ed and Ed and me placed at the gift table of our wedding welcome area. His favorite foods were the names of each of the reception tables, and a shout out to him was on the ceremony programs we stayed late at my office printing on the gold Indian paper that Chris’s mother bought in India. There was no way I’d have a wedding and pretend my brother didn’t exist or wasn’t important to me. I needed him to be everywhere, otherwise I couldn’t pull this wedding off and be sane.

We even had some of Ed’s favorite songs, such as Shania Twain’s “From This Moment On” and Mariah Carey’s “Hero played. And what not a single person knew, not even Chris, was that right before my parents walked me down the aisle for our wedding ceremony, I took out a tiny 1″ by 1” photo of Ed when he was just in elementary school and tucked it into the ivory ribbon that wrapped my bridal bouquet. This way, Ed would be closest to me during the ceremony and near me all night long; at the ceremony, during photos, at the reception head table, and back with me at the end of the night when everything has ended and everyone has gone home.

He lives on in me, and we hope he also enjoyed the wedding as much as we did.

Wedding customization: food and flowers

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The truth is that although I don’t like cookie-cutter weddings, in general I love, love weddings. I love the idea of family and friends getting together to see two people join lives. I love the corniness of “love in the air” and people thinking about falling in love and being together forever. I also love everyone having this excuse to dress up in their finest and get decked out for a special occasion… and taking lots and lots of pictures to prove how good looking they all really are. I am a little brainwashed by Disney and love a happy ending.

But to try to prevent us from seeming like we would have a cookie cutter wedding, Chris and I spent the last year trying to figure out the best ways to make this wedding really “us.” How do we infuse this with the ridiculous and funny, light-hearted but heartfelt beings that we try to be?

Where did we start thinking about this? Well, if you know me at all, we started with the food. I sought out the only caterer of the three preferred caterers our venue was contracted with that would allow us the most cultural customization with our menu to reflect our cultures and our food loves. We had Vietnamese (which exceeded any and all expectations for both quantity and quality) for our welcome/rehearsal dinner, so we didn’t have to worry about that. For our reception, this ultimately resulted in Chinese, Malaysian, Indian, Thai, Mexican, and American-influenced dishes. We had to have a good mix of meat, seafood, and vegetables to accommodate our pescatarians and our meat-eaters alike, and there absolutely had to be rice. And because we’re in California, we wanted the option of tacos and quesadillas. so we made it happen via interactive food stations instead of formal plated dishes. We asked for a lot of customization, additions, and deletions (which, frankly, we had to pay quite a bit for), but in the end, it was all worth it. The food we had at our wedding was exactly like what we ate during our wedding tasting. And for the dishes we didn’t get a chance to taste but totally took a chance on, like the leg of lamb, the chicken tikka masala, and the butternut squash soup with ginger-poached pear, they were even better than they sounded on paper.

I was so proud to have wedding food that no one grumbled about or said was tasteless or worse, over-salted. And since Chris has always been a big snacker, he wanted to have little bowls of some of his favorite snacks, which include banana (plantain) chips, and his Aussie favorite Arnott’s Barbeque Shape crackers. Chris could gorge on these all day if you allowed him to, so we felt this was representative of us. We made sure to have Ben, his brother, groomsman, and MC, let all the guests know during the reception what these little snacks were in the bowls on their reception tables. And our wedding favors were many different flavors of Tim Tams, Chris’s favorite biscuit/cookie, which is also of Arnott’s from Australia. So we sent guests home with these biscuits packaged in plum purple organza drawstring bags with “With Love” labels that had on our names on them that we got complimentary from Wedding Paper Divas, courtesy of my cousin who works at Shutterfly.

What about dessert? We both love tropical flavors, so my first instinct was to try to find a dessert shop that could make us a mango cake. The only one that offered this was a shop that had a very high cake minimum and was hell-bent on using fondant; they were the ultimate cake Nazis. Neither of us likes fondant, so that was nixed. We finally found a dessert shop that could not only make our wedding cake image come true, but also accommodate mini desserts for the dessert table I’d always dreamed of having and having styled in our wedding colors. The wedding cake flavor was not mango in the end sadly, but was still tropical: vanilla cake with passion fruit filling and coconut cream cheese frosting. And because having wedding cake and four different mini desserts was not enough for me for variety, we also hired and got a great deal on a gelato cart, offering flavors that reflect us: pistachio (my favorite gelato flavor by far…with real pistachio chunks), tiramisu (hello, gelato is Italian, so we can’t NOT have tiramisu), pumpkin pie (very American), and mango sorbetto (to make up for not having mango cake). (Full disclosure, the dessert shop completely messed up on our cake design, as we ordered a completely different design and shape than what was delivered, but we’re taking it up with them now. It’s happily the only thing that really went “wrong” during the wedding day).

I researched and hand-picked every single seasonal floral and leaf stem put into the bridal and bridesmaid bouquets, the corsages and boutonnieres, and all center pieces and altar flowers. I loved the plum anemones, the white garden roses, the bright green cymbidiums, and the plum and white lilies the most. They gave a romantic but fresh look to the entire venue that I was so excited about when my florist presented the bouquets to me. She was happy to hear what I wanted, but also very proactive in giving me suggestions for the look we were trying to achieve. Chris said he didn’t care what I chose as long as there were orchids. We had two types of orchids, so he was very happy in the end. In fact, I’m surprised by how much he actually raved about the wedding flowers. He seemed more thrilled with the end result than I was!

He was there smiling at me.

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When people say that your wedding day is one of the most emotionally charged days of your life, they are really saying the truth. On our wedding day, I woke up crying and feeling sick in the stomach because I knew Ed wasn’t going to be there. I texted my friend and bridesmaid, who came to my room immediately to hold and comfort me. “It’s normal to feel this way,” she said, “but Ed wouldn’t want you crying on your wedding day. He’d want you to be smiling and happy.” I sucked it up, put ice on my eyes, and had my hair and makeup done with our design team with the moms and bridesmaids.

When “Jupiter” played during the bridal processional and my parents walked me out to the ocean terrace towards the altar, we stopped at the top of the stairs where Kim, my coordinator, asked me to stop so the photographers could get photos of my parents and me staring out at the water and our guests. We stopped there for a few seconds longer than we were supposed to because when I looked out, the first face I saw… was Ed. He was wearing a suit and a tie, and he was smiling back at me. I caught my breath and blinked my eyes, and then he was gone; what I thought was him was actually Chris’s friend’s husband smiling up at me.

I know I didn’t imagine him, though. He was really there. He was really standing there, smiling at me and happy that his baby sister was getting married. I missed him the entire day, but for him and for Chris, my family and friends, I was so happy. It was truly the happiest and most fun-filled day of my life.

Wedding vows revealed

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We wrote our own wedding vows and tried our best to customize our wedding as much as possible to reflect us and what is most important to us. These are the words and promises I shared on an ocean terrace overlooking the Pacific Ocean in Southern California today:

Eight years ago when we first met, it was certainly not love at first sight. But, it was definitely the beginning of an amazing friendship that over time, somehow evolved into a passion that has reached a depth I never thought possible. The truth is that before I met you and loved you, I always thought that in the ideal life partnership, two people would accept each other as is, and that was it. With you, I’ve realized how wrong I was. The rawest and most genuine love is one that recognizes your potential, is able to challenge you to reach that potential, and is ultimately able to encourage you to be the best possible version of yourself. It takes great strength, courage, and a lot of tough love to get there, but when we love, we face our fears, and we move forward in spite of those fears.

In you, I have found my best friend in every sense of the word. Your empathy, understanding, and optimistic view of the world and our place to contribute to it have inspired me to love more, give more, and slowly lose the cynicism I’ve held onto for so long. In my darkest hours, you’ve cut through all surrounding chaos and made clear your endless devotion to me and making my world a better, happier, and calmer place. You are not only my best and most loyal friend; you are my fiercest defender, my cheerleader, my travel and culture buddy, my food adventure mate, my taste testing guinea pig (even when my dishes don’t always come out well), my laundry boy, and my soul mate and inspiration.

Today, in front of our family and friends, I promise to continue growing with you, to encourage you to be all you are capable of being as you do with me. I vow to laugh, wrestle, and play with you even when life circumstances are challenging and hard. I promise to cook you fried rice and chicken curry stew, to rub your scalp with coconut oil when it gets too dry, to sew up the holes in your shirts and pants.. since you are inept at sewing. 🙂 But, above all, I promise to cherish and love you forever, putting you, my fuzzball, above all else.

I look forward to all of our life adventures together as we grow older, have a family, and contribute to this world we share together. My world is a brighter place with you in it. Thank you for loving and believing in me.