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On the evening of July 17th, 2018, I killed myself. After I swallowed an entire bottle of pills for a thyroid condition I never had, and now never would have, I felt my organs shutting down as my breathing ceased, my heart completely stopped, and a massive headache coming on as my neurological system shut down from a complete lack of oxygen. A few minutes later, I was dead.


Someone must have discovered my lifeless body on my bedroom floor. I don't know who. It's not important. I'm not sure if anyone cried or even if I had a memorial or funeral service. It's against the rule of all religions to kill yourself, I'm sure, so I don't think any churches or Buddhist temples would want to hold a "celebration" in my honor.


If I didn't get a funeral or memorial, whatever. My parents could use that money to save for their retirement anyway.


If I did, I'm sure like a few people came, not because they really wanted to, but "out of respect for my parents and family," like my aunts and uncles who wanted to be there to provide "moral support" to my mom and dad, not because they actually knew me or who I truly was as their niece.


I bet my cousins only came out of respect too, not because they ever interacted with me as part of their family. I had not interacted with Mary for years, neither face to face or through any form of social media, so when my ghost saw her walk in with her boyfriend, I had no idea why she was even there or why she had taken time away from her precious New York startup to fake compassion for me and my family. My aunt and uncle probably made her come or whatever.


Maybe a few "friends" came too just because they'd feel bad for not doing so or some shit. Not that anyone would remember their "kindness" in even a few months anyway, so I don't know why they had bothered.


Although I had known Katie since the seventh grade, I knew almost nothing about her personal life, other than the fact that she liked films and was majoring in economics at UC Irvine. The bits and pieces I did hear about her mom's hepatitis, her sister's heart surgery, and her family emergency in Taiwan never formed a cohesive narrative anyway.


Jessica probably wouldn't come. It would take too long for the news of my suicide to reach San Jose, and plus I died leaving the fragments of our friendship on shitty terms anyway. No point in flying over from some person you thought was a needy bitch anyway. I wouldn't do it either.


As for my few classmates from Berkeley, I was touched that they came, taking the hour-long flight from SFO to LAX just to listen to some meaningless fake shit about some person they knew for one or two semesters. I frankly don't know why Tom came if Jojo the Corgi (code name for his crush) was all he could see in his future anyway. I was just someone who happened to live on the same dorm floor as he did and someone he'd probably forget after graduating anyway.


As for the other people who came, I didn't care enough to pay attention to them if they weren't friends or family. Just like the rest, they probably felt obligated to go for no good reason at all, or remembered me from school either as a teacher, coach, or classmate.


I was totally shaking my head in disbelief at their fakeness; they weren't part of my family and didn't know me as a friend or person at all, so why would they even bother to drive over to this three-hour event for nothing was beyond me if they didn't even talk to me much when I was still on Earth. I hated fake people when I was alive, and my hatred for them didn't dissipate with my death. I just lost the consciousness and need for it to affect me so extensively, which was a relief.


The memorial service began, and people sang dumb religious songs for no good reason, as my entire family went atheist after my brother's death seven years ago. I wasn't ever religious either, so my ghost was just chilling in the back wondering why the hell they hired some musician to lead everyone in some stupid rendition of "Amazing Grace" when that part of the ceremony didn't reflect me as a person anyway. And wasn't suicide gonna put me in hell anyway? God didn't save a wretch like me.


After my ears bled listening to all that religious crap, a pastor came up on stage and led everyone in some weird religious cult verse ceremony, once in Chinese and once in English. I shook my head at that too. Everyone at the ceremony spoke fluent English, so there was no need for the Chinese, even if my family was Chinese. If anything, they should have done that in Spanish instead of Mandarin, not for them, but for my love of the language's expressivity, structure, and easily-learned mechanical grammar rules.


Then, they had a few people come up on stage and talk about who they thought I was. My dad started first as an immediate family member, and the melena that flowed out of his mouth, the bullshit being the coagulated blood in the watery diarrhea bullshit was composed of "she was a wonderful, considerate, loving daughter who, as an aspiring doctor and Berkeley student, had a bright future and high hopes."


Nothing was ever said about the many fights that ensued over my 2240 SAT score, me being scolded in the aftermath of my brother's death for not being considerate enough of my mother's grief, him yelling at me just the week before about not being goal-oriented enough, or my shitty 760 on the SAT 2 Chemistry exam.
I had a bright future despite what he (and even his friend, who also talked shit) deemed subpar test scores and not being goal oriented enough? I was considerate even despite being yelled at for not being "loving" enough towards my mom in 2011? Shocking how people change their perspective about you in death.


Katie tried to stammer her way through an obviously made-up speech about the nonexistent days we went to the beach and hung out, spent time together at my apartment together watching movies, worked on homework together at Starbucks despite her not drinking any sort of coffee, how I'd be remembered for my "intelligence," work ethic, sarcasm, and how much I meant to her as a friend and great emotional support to her in high school and college, even though I barely knew anything about her personal life outside of academic and extracurricular stress. Lol, meant to her as a friend. I barely knew her and she barely knew me, as she stated herself when "my sister is my best friend," relegating me to the position of "school acquaintance I will largely forget about after HS graduation and occasionally text while we are at colleges 5 hours away from each other" I rolled my eyes throughout most of her speech. The overly, fakely sad tone she was using betrayed the fact that she knew she was bullshitting everyone, and I knew it too.


I suppose a few other speakers came up, but they weren't as notable. I didn't even know why they bothered to write anything if they knew me even less than the previous two speakers, who didn't know me at all. Maybe my physics teacher came up with some even more bullshit, although more eloquent, I admit, about me, just to get more "patronage" on his latest unemployment-inspired side gig after being fired from yet another school.


No one talked about my love of inorganic and bioinorganic chemistry, Spanish, researching what propelled differences in educational outcomes, sociology, psychology, public health, human biology, sunshine, mochi ice cream, Christina Perri, writing, nor the way that academic and professional success ruthlessly defined my self-worth.


But I guess you'd need a significant other if you wanted anyone to know you that intimately. You'd never get that connection with family or friends because everyone moves out at 18 and never comes back anyways, and because you're never going to have a future with your college buddies after commencement at California Memorial Stadium so why bother learning that much about a person whereas you would, or you thought that you would grow old, grey, and frail with Andrew, Ashwinee, Noah (my eyes swimming with anger and frustration-induced tears and memories of him staying in our dorm room until 3 am), Nathan*, Jojo the Corgi, Jaeyoung, Megan, and Kevin? Love persists in sickness and death, good and bad, and friendship doesn't, right? It ends after graduation, a cross-country move, or just falling out of touch. But you'd never stop texting your husband or wife, am I right?
Thanks for the reminder, society, love songs, Jessica, Nonnie, a good 75% of my dorm floormates, and my 2 ex-roommates. Even in death, I felt a pang of anger and emptiness in my quickly rotting stomach muscles, even though nothing mattered anymore.


After that and a slideshow about my life, which was also not reflective of me at all, just a mere collage of baby and childhood pictures that anyone with access to my family's photos and a downloadable version of Microsoft PowerPoint could have put together.


Then everyone decided that the funeral had dragged on for too long, and it all ended. People filed out, saying meaningless encouragements to my parents in the form of "I'm so sorry," "thoughts and prayers to you and your husband/wife," "we'll come visit you if you want."


A week later, I was buried in the same lot as my brother at Green Hills Memorial Park. They couldn't bury me next to him because there was no space. It was a more intimate ceremony. As my ashes were thrown into the ground, darkness ensued and there was nothing. I wasn't burning away in hell, nor was I in heaven with Jesus and the angels. I guess this was some sort of purgatory, but I was finding it harder and harder to come back to Earth, so perhaps not. Not that I wanted to, anyway—otherwise what was the purpose of killing myself?


I wasn't able to reconnect with any "loved ones" except my brother, but in my life, I never truly loved anyone but him. I was only able to talk to him because of our proximity to each other, and because there is no "heaven" in which you get to see the deceased again. It's just blackness, nothingness, and the occasional conversation with others in your burial lot, whether that's strangers or family. There is no pressure to keep up false pretenses, small talk, or fake niceties, however. We're all dead and need our eternal rest from the hell that is life, so no offense is taken if a person or two doesn't want to talk.


My brother Thomas and I quickly made up for the seven years of lost conversation we had in just 2 weeks. I told him about all the pressure I felt in high school and college to succeed academically and professionally, self-harming when I felt like I would break from all of the pre-professional intensity at Berkeley, and how, at one point, I wanted to be a pediatric oncologist to avenge his death from cancer and the emptiness DIPG so cruelly left me with, but that I feared not having the grades and other credentials to do so.


How I would never "measure up," to my cousin, another aspiring doctor, with a 3.7 sGPA and 3.8 cGPA and 512 MCAT, and how I had spent my entire high school career worrying that I would be the only cousin to not get into a "good school." How…unfulfilled I felt, emotionally, how conflicted and angry I felt about the concept of a significant other, how I was easily attached to random people I met in my life for no reason, how inadequate I felt at Berkeley, and wondering whether I'd ever "make it" in the real world according to my own, my parents', and society's standards, whether I'd ever learn how to pay a mortgage, do taxes, pay bills, or ever feel like a success, really.


For the first time in my life, I was completely real with someone who could take the heaviness and understood.


After listening to all that, he responded that he understood. He died before he turned 8, so he never got to live out his dreams of being a mechanical engineer, pilot, drafter, or architect, but he said he would be willing to trade death any day for his unfulfilled career aspirations because of how rough life would have been had he lived or never gotten cancer.


Long after our conversation ended, I was just…so relieved. I was dead and no one expected anything of me, not even myself. I was dead and didn't need to do anything.


I didn't have to go back to Berkeley and compete against an infinite amount of premeds in a grade-deflated environment medical schools and my parents refused to recognize.


I didn't have to have a heart attack before every single midterm and final exam.


I didn't need to worry about applying to an infinite number of research lab positions, work-study jobs that aligned with my career goals to gain experience and to fund my education, tweaking my resume and cover letter to the point where I had no more identity as a person.


I didn't need to worry about how my extracurriculars and experience stacked against other people or whether I was a standard deviation above the median or not.


I didn't need to worry about accentuating my looks to not feel insecure around more naturally attractive girls.


I didn't need to self-harm or get irrationally angry whenever I saw a couple or read a friend's candid text about what a boyfriend or crush did for him/her.


I didn't need to deal with my less-than-ideal family situation anymore, or feeling like I didn't even belong in my own family.


I didn't need to worry about being my parents' trophy.


I didn't need to worry about what would happen if I didn't qualify for medical school or didn't do well on the MCAT.


I didn't need to feel so disheartened at the credentials of Berkeley alumni who matriculated to Harvard, Yale, UCSF, UCLA, or whatever T10 medical school that I so naively thought that I'd have the credentials before organic chemistry and other classes ruined my dreams of having a perfect GPA.


I tried to convince myself, and knew that it didn't really matter where you went to medical school, as long as if it was somewhere in the United States, but humans always want for more. That was one advantage of being dead. You didn't need anything. You weren't even alive! And hence you didn't want anything.


I didn't have to feel annoyed and angry at all the people who told me to stay alive for no good reason at all.


I didn't have to remember that Tom made a handmade birthday card and obtained a $50 Kate Spade scarf for Jojo the Corgi, which was a stark contrast to the lame "happy birthday" he wished me on my birthdate.


Most of all, I just didn't need to deal with the cyclical suicidal, depressive, and borderline thoughts that cycled through my brain every day instead of more intelligent thoughts that would have saved my grades.


I even got reunited with my brother faster than I would have than if I sucked it up and lived until I was 80 or 90. Perhaps my mother was right when she was suicidal and manipulative, saying that if I didn't do X, she'd have no hope in life and just kill herself to rejoin Thomas again.


There was just…nothing, apart from the conversations I'd have with my brother. And even if I weren't given the opportunity to talk to him, death would still be better than life, for all the reasons I listed above.


For the first time in my life, I felt relief knowing that I had done the right thing by consuming the entire bottle of levothyroxine and managing to die before medical help arrived.


I had always second-guessed myself during my horrible time on Earth, and it was such a relief giving into the nothingness and blackness of death.


When I occasionally had the chance to walk the Earth again to visit random people I knew throughout my human life, I saw how stressed they were about classes, their jobs, and their personal life.


Some people, in fact, had really dark days.


A 50-year old woman who had never been married or had children had held out hope for a last first kiss for many months in her new relationship, but he had been cheating on her since the beginning. What was she going to do, create a Match.com profile or even a Tinder and hope for the best, or just prepare to die old and lonely with no kids to care for her?


Another lady, a younger 29 year old, had been trying to get pregnant for 3 years but had just suffered through her third miscarriage. She didn't even have an ultrasound to remember him or her by.


A 34 year old man had just lost his sister, nephew, and girlfriend all within the span of 2 weeks. Why not just join them?


A single dad struggling to make ends meet had just gotten laid off from his highest-paying job. How was he going to feed himself and his kids now? He had no college degree or real marketable skills.


An 18 year old woke up to another day where she'd have to struggle with depression and anxiety throughout the entire morning, afternoon, and evening. Why live like this when there's no consciousness in death? No happiness, perhaps, but none of the mental torture she faced every day.


A Berkeley student in computer science had just gotten rejected from an internship at Google. That was certainly a blow to his confidence. How was he going to compete with all the other driven, motivated students also gunning for internships at Facebook and whatnot other Silicon Valley companies?


But they decided to go on anyway for no reason. Other than the silly mortal hope that better days would come, even though they had clearly all hit some sort of rock bottom in varying degrees and shades.


I was somewhat awed by their resilience but mostly full of contempt, as in, foolish human, why the fuck would you do that instead of just dying? The small happy moments aren't worth staying alive for when you have heavy shit like that happen to you almost every day.


In my death, I sometimes missed trolling people, being sarcastic, and even the meaningless superficial conversations I started with people for my self-amusement, but watching their mortal suffering always made me realize death was a solution to a permanent quandary called life.