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.