orphan

It is true that I am a fully grown (or seemingly) adult, and the term does not really apply to me as I’m not a child, but I have effectively become an orphan of late. My father passed away when  I was 19 years old due to massive heart attack, and last week my mother succumbed to her  year and a half battle with ALS (Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis). She was diagnosed while I was living in China, in January 2016 and a week after her birthday she passed away in hospice care. I am the soul heir to the family name.

I am an only child and now I feel as thought a safety net has been taken away from me. I don’t have someone to call or ask for sage advice for things that the newer generation just know. I don’t have somewhere to go if everything goes to shit. I literally am driving solo from this point forward, and frankly it’s terrifying. It is sad what has happened, but I accepted it and processed it long before it happened as I know it was inevitable. When battling a disease with no cure and not much known about it, there is little that one can do other than advocate and try to make it better for the future.

I am not sure if many people know, because I’m living abroad right now but when I return to Canada in the summer and will host a memorial at the family house, which I have to sell since I am no longer living in Canada. It is going to be a huge job to purge 30 years of personal things, but I will have the support of my sister/cousin and others that I’m sure will come to my aid.

So back to what I was talking about; being an orphan. Sure it doesn’t apply to me but I can’t help feeling like I am. There was so much of my childhood that I did not experience as a result of growing up so fast, so I can’t help feeling like something is missing. Before I was afraid to mess up, and I never really did mess up, but now the pressure is all on me. If something doesn’t work out for me, I’m solely responsible and have to deal with the consequences. I am responsible, but I feel like maybe I’m not so prepared to take risks.

Bar that, finishing out the academic year and then planning on enjoying the summer despite the sad passing. Volleyball, maybe some tennis, and maybe getting fit, all on the horizon. Oh yeah, and getting a genetic test to see if my DNA has the ALS gene that was identified in my mother’s DNA. Hurrah. </sarcasm>

After debating going to see this with friends, and being rejected all around as people don’t like thrillers, I decided to go to the cinema to do some stalking of someone at the concession stand, but also to see this film which oddly I really liked. It’s listed as a drama, but it’s clearly a thriller wannabe-horror film. It centres around a girl, Esther, who is adopted from a religious orphanage in a small remote town in New England. She comes from Russia, and integrates into the family well, seemingly a perfect little child, albeit weird with her oldish type of dressing, and the ribons that she always wears around her neck and wrists.

Everything bad seems to happen around Esther, and it soon is revealed that she’s a 33 year old Estonian mental-hospital escapee who cons families into adopting her, as she has a genetic disease making her look like a girl, and when the fathers of the famalies decline her sexual advances she turns on them.

All in all a great story line, a little bit gruesom, but for a child from hell film, I’m quite impressed. I liked the way that it was done. It has renewed my interest in Estonian culture, even though this film negatively protrays it. I think also the directors fudged a bit with the timezone differences. If it’s night time in the middle of winter in America, it’s not light outside in Estonia; duh!