Since I graduated from high school in June 2004, I’ve had the same glass framed photo of my brother and me from that day in every room I’ve slept in – all four dorm rooms in college, my Elmhurst apartment, and now my apartment on the Upper East Side in Manhattan. In the photo, we are happily posing together, just the two of us, in our San Francisco dining room, right behind some of the graduation flowers I was given. I am wearing the orchid lei that my uncle had shipped fresh from Hawaii that morning, and my brother is smiling proudly without his glasses. I always told him he looked better without glasses on. Back then, Ed was as stable as he could have been, working at Macy’s, going to Kenpo karate three times a week in the sunset. I never would have thought that less than ten years later, he’d no longer be in my life. I miss Ed. Sometimes, I really just can’t believe that he isn’t here anymore.

I’m coming home to San Francisco in 11 days. As I was thinking about it last night, without even realizing it, I wondered in my head if Ed would be coming to the airport with my parents to pick me up. And as I caught myself thinking that, I realized that it still hasn’t fully sunk in that he’s gone from this life. My Ed will never pick me up at the airport again, nor will he see me off and help me with my luggage to check in. He will never be at home, sitting at his desk, waiting for me to come back. He will never jump out of his seat again to embrace me and say how happy he is to have me back home again. Coming home will never be the same again, and a certain emptiness will always linger in my mind and my gut when I think of coming home.

In March of this year, when I last saw my brother alive (but not so well), I left San Francisco on a flight back to New York, and on that flight, I sobbed for half of it and had to go to the bathroom to prevent people from staring at me. I was so worried and scared that something like this might befall us, that I could lose my brother forever. And now that fear has become my reality. Every day, I wake up, and I realize that everything that has happened in the last six weeks has been painfully real, and my brother will never inhale or exhale again. Life hurts. The truth hurts.

According to many studies done, the average human being has anywhere from 500 to 700 different strong abilities and skills. So although when you ask most people what their strengths are, and they only name maybe three or four, they are actually being quite modest. Either that, or many of their potential skills have yet to be discovered. The saddest part about that is for those who never realize their talents and abilities, and they remain dormant the rest of their lives. They die, and they lived an entire life not being aware of their hidden gifts.

I think in many ways, that was my brother. Because he had to endure a lot of harsh treatment everywhere from a very young age both at home and at school, his curiosity for life was squashed, which resulted in him never really wanting to explore the areas outside of where he was familiar. All little children are innately born curious; they want to smell, touch, see, and taste everything and anything they can get their little hands on. But once you start reinforcing in them that they should be denied things or criticize them every time they stumble and fall, that curiosity gradually gets chipped away until there could possibly be no more.

I’m honestly terrified of having kids. I’m scared that one day, though I am conscious of all the things I abhor about the way we were raised and want to put a stop to the negative cycle, that subconsciously it will start creeping out in the form of mothering my own children. All I wanted was for my brother to be happy, and I failed. What if I end up failing with my own future kids, too?

Chris and I are spending the long holiday weekend here in Toronto, where his brother Ben currently lives and works. Like Ed and I were before, they are close despite distance and age gap, and they certainly bicker in similar ways. As I get lost in their arguing and bickering back and forth, I suddenly realize that Ed and I will never have another bickering session ever again; we will never agree or disagree or raise our voices at each other. I will never cut him off again when he’s saying something inane, and he will never respond “nothing” again, as he had done in the last few months of his life when I asked him what he was up to. It’s depressing to think about how all the things your sibling once did that annoyed you before when he was still alive can be things you actually learn you miss once they are gone.

I have always loved water – the sight of it, the sound of it, and the taste of it. Seeing the ocean and being at the beach have always been things that have calmed and made me happy. Yet oddly today, after we arrived in Toronto and walked along the waterfront here along Lake Ontario, a dark feeling came over me when I remembered that water was the last place my brother was when he left us forever.

Drowning wasn’t what ended his life; it was the blunt trauma caused by the fall. He fell a long way down before hitting the crashing waters under that bridge. And it took the coast guard about 45 minutes to get out there and take his poor, lifeless body out and declare that he was no longer alive. It’s as though when I look at water now, I can’t feel the same way about it anymore because throughout today, I just kept on thinking about my brother’s body sinking, then eventually floating to the surface, his spirit gone.

Happy birthday, Ed! Today, you turn 34, yet every time I look at you in all your photos for the last eight years, you’ve never seemed to age. And now, you are ageless to me. You will always get older and wiser, but your face will remain beautifully youthful and wrinkle-free.

Life isn’t the same without you, Ed. Each day, as I think I am moving on with my life, something triggers pain in me that reminds me that you are not awakening each morning the way I do or breathing air like the rest of us. This sounds gross, but even when I put on my retainer before bed each night, I think of you because you were always so good about wearing yours, too. I still have a hard time believing I will never speak with you again or feel your embrace. It hurts so much when I think of all the suffering you went through. I’m so sorry that I couldn’t do enough to take it all away. I feel like in many ways, I failed you.

You came to me again in another dream two nights ago, Ed. In it, I came home to San Francisco, and I saw you standing in the kitchen. I immediately ran up to you and threw my arms around you and squeezed you until you started coughing. For a few seconds, you were okay with it, and then after that in your awkward way, you tried to get rid of me by squirming, and saying, “Yvonne! What are you doing?! Let go!”

I don’t want to let go of you, Ed. I’m madly infuriated at the world for how unfair everything and everyone has been to you. I’m even angry with myself because I couldn’t help you more. I wish I could have made all the wrong things right for you. I’m so sorry. I miss you. I miss my amazing brother, the best brother I could have possibly had. You will be my inspiration to be stronger for the rest of my life. You will always be inside of me. Please know that.

Today, I spent most of the morning in bed, lying awake, crying because I still hate the fact that Ed isn’t here. I thought about how I was supposed to fly home with Chris tomorrow to see him and celebrate his 34th birthday (which is tomorrow), and how all of those plans are cancelled now. Does anyone else in our family care that tomorrow is my brother’s birthday, or are they just going about their regular everyday lives as though nothing is different? If he were still with us, would they have called him to wish him a happy birthday, or sent him a gift to show that they cared?

Chris and I are going to Jackson Heights tomorrow for Indian food to celebrate Ed’s birthday. We originally had plans to take Ed to have Indian food to celebrate, and we are still going to do this. We’re getting a little cake and will sing for him.

Ed, we’re never going to forget your birthday. We are going to celebrate it every year, light candles, and make sure that we remember you and show that you will be loved forever.

I’ve spent the last week probably being the most angry I have ever been in my life. A lot of that anger is directed at my family and how I don’t think anyone ever did enough or cared enough for my brother. I have cousins who say they hadn’t talked to or seen Ed in months (you think your life is that busy? Well, he’s dead now, so I guess you will never talk to him again); I have relatives who used to come over who would barely talk to Ed, and then lo and behold, they are crying at his funeral, probably more for themselves for being so petty and superficial rather than the fact that my brother is gone. And then there are my parents, who are criticizing everyone and accusing everyone of not caring. “So what if they came to the funeral? I didn’t ask them to come. They took the day off? It’s not like it was unpaid leave; it was paid time off for all of them.” It’s such a negative, petty, miserable, sad world at home. To be surrounded by this constantly would probably drive anyone to jump off a bridge.

I dreamt last night that Ed was in his casket in his bedroom, with the lid open, so we could see his serene face. He is fully dressed in the suit and purple tie that I pressed for his final time being clothed. My parents dumped all their clean laundry on top of him to begin folding. I started cursing them non-stop, asking them what in the world they were doing and to take all of that laundry off of my dead brother.

I think I’ve come to terms with the fact that my Ed is no longer a part of this world with us. But I have not accepted the stupidity of our family and the world around us that mistreated him.

I realize a lot of people have some degree of dysfunction in their family, but once you introduce suicide into the picture, you realize that your family probably was pretty screwed up.

My dad’s mother experienced a physical and mental breakdown when she was just in her 30s, which resulted in my dad, his brother, and sister needing the care of their aunt for an entire year. My mom was born and raised in Vietnam, where she saw the war happen right in front of her eyes, and had to actually witness her two brothers get shot and killed right at their home. After my parents got married, my dad took my mom back here to the States, where she had to endure constant verbal abuse and yelling from my dad’s mom, who rejected her because she was Vietnamese (seen as lesser in the eyes of an old-school Chinese mother) and spoke only broken English when she first arrived. My brother grew up with low self-esteem due to bullying at a young age, hyper-critical and verbally and physically abusive parents, and jobs where he was verbally demeaned. He attempted suicide for the first time at the age of 17 (when I was 11 1/2 years old), and was then diagnosed with clinical depression, multiple anxiety disorders, and obsessive compulsive disorder shortly after. My dad and his living brother and sister do not communicate unless they are obligated to when I come home or when a family wedding or funeral happens. My brother never finished college and never had a job to fully support himself financially, so because of that, many family members rejected him and looked at him like he was lesser – even our own parents. They treated him that way, as well, and continued to do so until the last day of his life. And this is not even all of it.

So when you look at all the above in my family’s history, it kind of might make you think, no wonder Ed was so fed up with the world and ended his life. I escaped all of that when I left home in 2004, and I don’t think I’ve ever made a better decision. But what makes me feel so horrible is that I was able to escape myself, but I wasn’t able to take him with me. All the time when I was in college or here working in New York, I’d get massive guilt pangs, thinking about how I was enjoying myself and learning and loving, and my Ed was not. Like in a dream I had my senior year of college when I was deciding where to move (or not to move) after school finished, it was as though he cut himself up into pieces and stuck himself in a box in our house, and there was nothing I could do to save him. I feel that even more so now that he is not on this earth with me. I just hate everything and almost everyone today. Too much pettiness and negativity exists in this world, and Ed realized how pointless it all was, and he decided he didn’t want it anymore. How can anyone want any of that?

Today marks one month since my sweet, beloved brother left this earth and went to heaven. It’s still hard to believe that he is not in the same form as we all are. The strange thing is that even though he has been gone for this long, I still feel his presence around me all the time. It’s like he is living through me inside of me. It almost makes me feel more at ease at times.

The other day, I contemplated what death actually feels like. I know none of us will know for sure until it’s our time, but I thought about it anyway and did Google searches for “what death feels like.” I came across a blog written by a mother whose 20-year-old son committed suicide by a self-inflicted gun shot wound four years ago. In it, she discusses how she can still feel his presence around her, and eventually begins communicating with her son through mediums. He tells her that death isn’t as bad as people imagine it to be. It’s really just like being alive, except that your soul leaves your physical body, and with it, it leaves behind all worry, stress, and every other negative feeling. You are then left with all of the memories of your earthly life in heaven, which is filled only with happiness – and love. I guess in this case, happiness and love are the same thing.

I hope that is where you are, Ed. I want anguish and suffering to be a distant memory of your past, and only love and happiness in your current place. Selfishly, though, I wish you were still here, just without the pain that drove you to leave me. I miss you so much. Please smile down on me from heaven every now and then and let me know you still love me and are watching over me.