Each year, the June gloom sweeps into San Diego with lugubrious clouds taking up residence, refusing to leave until July. The June my parents died was unseasonably hot. The clouds entered early, an ominous warning of the dark period to follow, and the gloom made my late-May graduation ceremony a dreary, humid affair, the months that followed downright interminable. It was an endless overcast sky that mirrored my grief exactly. Later that summer, I deferred med school entry, citing a death in the family—two of them. I moved into my parents’ home, because it held all my happy memories left; Angela wanted me to sell it, but I didn’t want to say goodbye to the memory of our parents and our foursome, too. Surfing, gardening, and self-defense classes dominated my days.

My newfound pursuits distracted me, all right—until five o’clock. Dusk was the first hint loneliness was inbound; the absence of traditions that began during my childhood and lasted well into college was deafening. My mom and dad used to put on Frank Sinatra or Billie Holiday—something jazzy—when they came home from their offices after work, and on Fridays my mother always bought peonies, whose fragrant scent lasted through the entire weekend.

I missed Angela most during those times, when grief would weigh the heaviest. She was the only one who knew the pain I felt. Siblings, for better or for worse, are the only people in the world with whom you share so many experiences, who outlast friends and lovers, who understand you because they witnessed your formative years firsthand. Once, through blurry eyes, I caught a glimpse of myself in a window’s reflection, and for a second—a bittersweet second—I thought it was Angela, come home to surprise me. To cry with me. So we could hold each other. That night was one of the hardest.

The second year I deferred my medical school admission, I began interning at the local veterans’ hospital on UCSD’s campus. The emptiness lingered. Yet interacting with the world again reinforced the desire to be a part of it—not simply slink along in the shadows. My parents had been killed on impact, their car slamming into the valley below the freeway; modern medicine could not have saved them, even if they’d slammed into a hospital. Watching people benefit from established treatments—casts for broken bones, dialysis, radiation—was reassuring. Consistent. Dependable. The whole experience restored in me a sense of trust and control in life again. This predictability felt like the polar opposite of the emotional chaos I’d been living, losing my parents suddenly.