Lunar New Year's Eve

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In Seattle. Just had a nice dinner at the Crab Pot, a famous seafood restaurant I first stumbled across when I came here for the first time by myself in 2009. Earlier, with my uncle and his family, we visited Boeing's Everett manufacturing plant, something I also did alone back in 2009. How much has happened since then!

The last time I was in Seattle day before Christmas in 2010. I met my cousins and aunt here, the plan was to show them around. But I boarded a flight that very night and flew straight back to Taiwan. To be with mum, as she went through intensive chemo. Good that I went when I did, for within days of my arrival, the doctor told her about the tumour growing on her spine. Effectively the doctor told her she didn't have long to live...

Mum is gone now. Those days and events back at the end of 2010 seem to be from a different era. I was pensive, struggling to find my way in life, but I was somehow doing alright. Now... I'm barely surviving. Now... I'm feeling the wrath of over-dependence on someone who I should have known would leave me. It just pains greatly that the absence of companionship and care comes at a time when I need companionship and care the most.

My uncle and his family can feel that there is a deep void in me. It's difficult to hide it, even if I try to keep a smile and keep up conversation. Mum was my uncle's closest sibling. I learned from my cousin that the day I called here to inform my uncle that mum had passed, he was greatly saddened. They were so close...

New Year's Eve dinner we ate at the nice seafood restaurant. It was pleasant, but not the same. Not the same as the reunion dinners I used to have with my family, not the same as the dinner I had this time last year with mum and my nephew, even though mum at very little and looked so weak. I guess from now on I have to get used to it, get used to life not being the same...