I.R.L…

I don’t know if this ever happens to anyone else, but often times, without rhyme or reason, a movie will fall into my lap that speaks so entirely well to my life at that moment.

For instance, I had gone by myself to see the film Lion, staring Dev Patel and Nicole Kidman. A film about a young man trying to come to terms with his own adoption. Him dealing with the isolation his feelings bring him. Feelings that people can sympathize with, but will never truly be able to understand. And his need to find his birth mother. At that time in my life, almost exactly, I had begun to feel the same way about my own adoption..

Today, my mother and I went to see the film The Big Sick, staring Kumail Nanjiani. Intended as a comedy, but we both knew it had some serious themes. 

If you haven’t seen it (and you should) be prepared for spoilers..

Nanjiani, a Pakistani-American battles the traditions and expectations of his family, and his feelings for an all American girl. She becomes terminally ill, and he is thrown headlong into her life, when her parents arrive. But where this movie struck home was, the aggressive nature of her illness. She goes to the E.R. for simply passing out, and shortly there-after she is put into a medically induced coma. Her infection, unknown in nature, quickly travels from her lungs, to her kidneys, and then to her heart. It is terrifying in its swiftness…

Tomorrow, my parents and I had plans to take the day, to travel across the channel, and visit some family friends. Old family friends from when I was a child. One daughter, my age, the other, just a couple years older, and currently battling extremely rare, extremely aggressive cancer..

You see these things all the time, in movies, on tv, and you always think, “these kinds of things don’t happen to people like us.” And then they do… and here we are…