In 1986 after returning from Thailand and barely a teenager, my vanaisa died with only my vanaema and myself there to witness it. It was a horrible scene - seeing my first dead person, right there beside me as I watched TV. When it happened, it was a blur. Yet as time went by, things came back to me clearly. I remember the running into a pitch black, un-lit street and dragging my foot along a gutter like a blind person to find the house three doors down where an ambulance driver lived; the knocking on the door in the middle of the night; the flat rejection to come help because I'd already rung for another ambulance; the turning around and having to face going back without help; standing there alone in the dark looking into the living room of the house with the lights on watching as my vanaema beat my vanaisa chest in vain to get his heart going again; not having the courage to go back in there; finally, FINALLY seeing an ambulance turn up, the paramedics turn him over on his side, scrape the sick from his mouth, put him on a trolley and into the ambulance never be seen again; seeing the ambulance driver from 3 doors down standing in the front yard having a laugh and a smoke with another person and what looked to be his ambulance.
Some things that have happened to me in life have washed over me easily. Other things like this have left something behind to be discovered later. Maybe this loathing I have today of the lack of apathy in the Australian psyche came from this event. It may have started the crack that would divide my serious Estonian side from the Australian "she'll be right mate" side of life.
After the usual sombre funeral, my vanaema moved back to the Eesti Kula. It wasn't foreign to her as she had lived there before when my vanaisa had run the place a few years earlier. What this meant for me was, instead of the occasional Estonian neighbour or friend dropping by, my vanaema would now be surrounded by all things Estonian. It would also spell the end of me spending weekends with my vanaema as I was growing older and my social activities were drawing my attention elsewhere.
Trying to fit in at school and get better at what interested me more than anything at the time - surfing (me right)- was all that occupied my mind. Girls were a distant second but seemed to be close enough to cause me enough trouble. It was around this time I can honestly say, I was as far removed from being Estonian as I could possibly be. I was swept up in conforming to the social norms of finishing school, getting a job and making a man of myself. What a wank/er.Once school had finished in 1990, being chained to Mt. Keira couldn't have kept me from getting out of Wollongong and going straight to Sydney where my destiny lay; being an apprentice mechanic for the fattest bastard to ever run a garage. Still, it was a job and it kept me off the streets. It also meant living in Coogee for the first time and on my own...except for annoying backpackers that Isa would stuff into the unit with me to cover the rent.
That first year in Sydney would be the beginning of Estonia starting to slowly factor in my life again. On an afternoon in March of 1991, and under the insistence of my vanaema, Isa and I got in the car and headed into the city to Eesti Maja (Estonian House). There, Isa and I cast a vote in a referendum we weren’t sure we had a right to be in, one we really didn't know much about, and one we weren’t sure would make a difference. But we voted anyway.
On the basis of results from that referendum, the final nail was placed into the coffin of Russia’s occupation as Estonia’s independence was re-affirmed in the eyes of its people and the world. I along with Isa had taken a very blind step into a very bright future.
