For the first year ever, the idea of giving and receiving Christmas gifts does not excite me. I am an anal organized list person. I usually like to make lists of who I am making Christmas cards for, who I am giving Christmas gifts to, and have an idea of when I will make and buy all of these things. This year, though I have already made the gift list, I am looking at it more in disdain than in excitement. I am not making holiday cards as I normally have in past  years because I feel no thrill at the idea of it. It’s cynical, but who is really going to appreciate all this paper anyway? I do, but then I will never see these cards again because I am giving them away.

The first year I started making cards, I also made Ed one. He threw it away after the New Year; he loves throwing things away and deleting e-mails as soon as he reads them. I asked him why he did that, and he responded, “I didn’t know that you wanted me to keep it.” From then on out, I never made him another card again, but I did send him Christmas and birthday cards, and when I came home in July to clean out his desk, he saved all of them in a neat pile in his desk. One by one, I tore them up and tossed them in the recycling… Except for one, which I placed inside his Bible that I put in his niche.

For the first year ever, I’m not going to be getting Ed a Christmas gift.

After another day of running around (but to three sites, not eight as we did yesterday) for Open House New York, we came home so that I could start preparing dinner – homemade pad thai. I’ve been wanting to make this for a while, but never got around to going to the Thai grocery stores in Chinatown that sell the specific ingredients I needed. I finally got everything I needed last week, and today, dinner was a success.

While cooking tonight, I thought about one of Ed’s birthdays when Ed and I spent the whole day together to celebrate. I can’t remember which one it was – it may have been his 27th or 28th birthday when I was still in college (this is when I get mad at myself for not taking more photos). We walked around Golden Gate Park, spent a few hours at the DeYoung Museum, which had been recently renovated, and I took him to lunch at Marnee Thai, one of his (and my cousins’) favorite Thai restaurants in the Inner Sunset right outside of the park. Ed was never a museum person, so it was great to take him through and actually see him exploring and appreciating what he wasn’t used to. I got him a cake from Schubert’s as usual, and overall, he seemed to be really happy that day.

It feels sad and lonely sometimes to think about the happier times when we were together and to know that we will never have future moments together again. It’s even worse to think that in those moments, I never would have guessed he would have been suicidal again. I see Ed and think about him when I eat and cook his favorite foods all the time. Sometimes, it’s a happy feeling, but most of the time, it feels miserable. I guess this is what it feels like to have once had a sibling and then suddenly one day, no longer have one. Even pad thai reminds me of him.

Since Ed has left me, I think I have a lower tolerance for people complaining about the mundane details of their lives. I have even less tolerance for people complaining about things that are superficial and not important in the grand scheme of life. Then again, I suppose that is relative, I guess what one person finds “important” isn’t necessarily important to the next person.

I just had lunch with a former colleague today who spent the entire meal complaining about all the things I vented about while at my last company. The difference between him and me is that I actually left the bad situation so that I could stop complaining and have a chance at career happiness. He did not. Why would I want to sit there for an hour to listen to someone else complain about my old situation that I left?

Then I thought, I have a great way to shut people up when they start complaining about things that they can either control (but choose not to) or things that are just insignificant. “My brother just committed suicide. Do you want to talk about that? Or do you not even care and think your problems are that bad?” Granted, I haven’t said that yet, but if anyone annoys me enough, I may just need to.

My brother lived a pretty simple life, and being pretty pragmatic, he invested and saved  a decent amount of money despite his limited income. He named me his primary beneficiary for a number of his accounts, but one of them has no one listed. Even the simple people in life, when they do not designate a beneficiary, leave behind a lot of paperwork and annoying phone calls for their loved ones to make to handle finances left behind.

After over two and a half months, I’m finally nearing the end of all the paperwork and phone calls, but every time I read those stupid lines at the beginning of each form, “Please accept our sincere sympathy for your loss,” I get so enraged and upset that I don’t want to look at the papers anymore, put it down, and then don’t look at them for another few weeks. That’s probably why this has dragged out so long. But this week, I’m finally getting it all over with. Once this is done, I never have to read that awful line again. I won’t have to think about how hard my brother worked for the little money he made, and all the taxes he had to pay to a country that is so broken that it couldn’t provide him adequate healthcare to address his needs.

Now that some time has passed, I am trying to think about all the events that have happened in the last two and a half months a little more rationally. One of the things that I have thought about extensively and reflect back on quite often is the day after I found out my brother passed. Chris and I flew back to San Francisco, and just hours later, my parents, aunt, and I are sitting around a round table with two Neptune Columbarium directors as we are negotiating what we want for Ed and how much it will cost. Death, sadly, is just another business deal. We may be mourning the death of a son or brother or nephew, but money is needed to pay for all this crap. They want to charge us as much as they want, and us still being practical despite being puffy eyed and tear-stained, we want to make sure we are not ripped off.

My brother was cremated, and my parents picked a nice urn and paid a substantial amount for the niche in which he would be interred at the Hall of Olympians at the Columbarium. Mind you, cremation is no longer the cheap option to choose when handling funeral arrangements; in fact, it’s catching up quite quickly with burials. While I won’t reveal any actual numbers, I will say that we were charged per character for the engraving on the urn for my brother’s full name, date of birth, and date of death (my dad and I tried to be humorous about this and joked that maybe in retrospect, we should have written Ed Wong instead of Edward Yuey Wong. However, my mom did not appreciate this comment), the actual opening of the niche to place the urn inside cost a three-digit figure (apparently you can buy a niche, and the fee doesn’t include actually putting the urns inside!), and the flowers we could have conveniently gotten through the Columbarium for the service cost over three times what we ended up paying at a neighborhood florist.

Dying is a business in the same way that giving birth and getting married are. It’s not a happy or exciting event to plan in the way that the latter are, but sadly, it’s a necessary part of life – and a part of life that is overpriced just like those happy events. It feels even worse to charge these astronomical fees for dying, though, because you are essentially taking advantage of people at their weakest and most vulnerable periods in life.

While reading my Twitter feed today, I found one tweet that was pretty depressing: this season, a Simpsons character will die. I immediately thought of the Bart figurine that I am keeping with me and bringing everywhere to symbolize Ed, and it made me really sad. In the short space of the last two and a half months, my brother, Chris’s best friend’s father, Chris’s cousins’ grandmother, my best friend’s friend, and my other best friend’s roommate’s coworker, have all passed away. My best friend from college has been diagnosed with lymphoma. Then, just yesterday, I found out that this “cold” that my dad has been battling for over a month is actually pneumonia, so I’ve forced him (via my mother, who is tending to him) to stay at home, take his antibiotics, and REST.

And now, one of the Simpsons characters is going to die, too? Even fictional people are dying in my life now! I don’t know how much more bad news I can handle. I’m nearing my breaking point with negative news and negative anything.

My feelings about San Francisco have changed quite a bit since I first left home for college in August 2004. The first few winters and summers that I’d come home, it felt warm (not temperature-wise, obviously), welcoming, inviting. “Come home!” it beckoned. “You belong here!”

The city started to evolve quite a bit, though; the Mission gentrified and started inviting all these overpriced restaurants to open along Mission Street. The Coronet, our childhood movie theater, got completely torn down and replaced with a multi-million-dollar Institute on Aging center. The street lights along Geary Boulevard and 20th Avenue seemed so much dimmer than I’d remembered. It has paved the way for me to believe that San Francisco itself has gotten seedier in some areas and that the place I have long called home doesn’t always feel like “home” anymore. Walking its streets, I feel like a stranger in my own city.

And now with my brother gone, never to welcome me home in his arms again, the city seems even colder and harsher to me than ever before. It is even less welcoming, a far less happier place for me to return to. And when I leave it, I have mixed feelings. I’m not sure if I should be happy or sad, nostalgic or resentful. Even the Golden Gate Bridge itself for me is now a bit tainted, and I can’t look at it the same way now. This city without my brother means less to me than it ever has in my whole life. When I think of San Francisco now, I just feel hurt and pain.

I’ve been working on cleaning out and filing my personal e-mail inboxes and organizing photos on my back-up drives, amongst a lot of other tedious types of busywork that needs to get done since I’ve been back in San Francisco. Without even being conscious of it, I realized today that the entire time I was going through photos and e-mails, when I’d look at the date of each, I would think, “this is before Ed left me,” or “this is after Ed left me.” It’s as though life through my eyes has only two eras – Before Ed (passed), and After Ed (passed). Any other era doesn’t seem to exist right now.

I miss Ed. Being home only magnifies how much I miss him and wish we could take another walk to Honey B Tea House on Clement Street like when we last went out alone together back in March. At dinner tonight, my mom pulled up a fourth chair at the table to place her purse on, and I immediately thought, Ed should be sitting in that chair right now. I miss my brother’s sweet innocence, even how he says “I don’t know” to things that he probably should know. He deserved more than what this world gave him. This isn’t fair.

I flew home today after a month and a half of being back in New York. I’m so used to Ed either rushing out to help me with my luggage or jumping out of his seat when I arrive that it was so deflating to see neither of those things happen today. Even while sitting in the living room, I still had the feeling he was there, and that any minute, he’d walk through the front door. His desk drawers have been completely cleared of their contents. When I opened his closet, once filled with a large collection of no-iron dress shirts, slacks, and fancy ties, it was already emptied with just rows and rows of empty hangers staring back at me. This sinking sensation came over me from my throat to my stomach when I saw this; he’s really never going to come back ever again. I’m never going to see my brother again.

I realized today that for the last several days, when I am seemingly relatively calm and quiet, my heart seems to be beating a lot faster than it maybe should be. It’s so obvious that when I am having conversations with people at work, I am cognizant of it. I’m not sure exactly why this would be the case… other than the fact that my brother is gone, my parents are miserable, and I’m preparing to enter a big stress zone pretty soon. Peace seems very far away right now.

Ed doesn’t seem to want to come back to me now. The last few nights, I have asked him in my head to come back to me because I miss him, and he hasn’t come. In fact, I wake up remembering I have dreamt, but I cannot remember what happened. This is probably his brotherly way of telling me to be strong and independent and not lean on him so much. I can’t help it. I’ve spent the last 27.5 years being used to having him around, so it’s going to take me a long time to accept this current life without him. When that will be is still uncertain and to be determined.