Ecstatic Adventures of the Exuberant Bodhisattva

FIVE: A Mother's Instinct

SIX: Okay. So I'm dead.

SEVEN: She ran away because she fucking hates her parents.

HAVE YOU SEEN EMMA?
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Help Find Emma Fillipoff Facebook Group
Email Erica: ericaschmidt85(at)gmail(dot)com
(contact form below)
Email Shelley: fillipoff(at)hotmail(dot)com
Call the police.

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Erica on Twitter: @mypelvicfloor

Where is Emma Fillipoff (Seven)

previous segments of Where is Emma Fillipoff

FIVE: A Mother's Instinct

SIX: Okay. So I'm dead.

Seven: She ran away because she fucking hates her parents

At this point, the best case scenario may very well be that Emma vanished of her own volition. In May of 2014, friends, family and police felt that they might have finally reached a turning point in Emma’s case. Owners of Hitz Boutique in Gastown, Vancouver reported that a “creepy” man walked into their clothing store. The man had short black hair, a mustache and goatee. Both of his forearms were covered in tattoos which looked like swirly outlines of flames. He carried a crumpled up poster and asked the store owners to throw it in the garbage. “It’s one of those missing persons posters,” he said. “Except she’s not missing. She’s my girlfriend and she ran away ‘cause she fucking hates her parents.” Disturbed and concerned, store owners Joel and Lori Sellen called the police. Yet again, the tip has led to nothing. Since the incident in Hitz Boutique, there have been no reported sightings of the man in the green t.shirt. We have no way of knowing if he was telling the truth.

Man in Green T. Shirt
Seen in Hitz Boutique, Gastown Vancouver.
May know where Emma is.
If you see this man,
please call the police.

“I just don’t believe that Emma is hiding and is in her right mind,” says Shelley. “She would not do that to us.”

Could Emma have forgotten who she is? Could delusions or schizophrenia have made her terrified of her family, and her past? Or does she simply hate her parents, as the mysterious man in the green t. shirt suggested?

Whether or not she’s in her right mind, the fact that she hasn’t touched her bank account remains troubling. Two to three thousand dollars goes a long way when you’re trying to exist off the grid, or start a new life. Or if you’ve ended up on the street, with the myriad of horrible circumstances this can entail.

Shelley fears that Emma has “completely lost her mind… And if she’s mentally ill enough she could have amnesia. That makes her prey to any creep who comes along who might say, hey I’ve got this stuff it’ll make you feel better. She could be doing meth, she could be into prostitution, she could be doing anything.”

“It’s gonna take Emma to find Emma,” Emma’s father James says this to Fifth Estate cameras, his face stained with tears. Who knows what it will take. It is rare that someone gets lost for so long, and that a search yields nothing but incongruous and inconclusive clues.
End of Part Seven.

Written by Erica J. Schmidt.

A reminder that this man may know where Emma is.
If you see this man, please call the police.

Where is Emma Fillipoff

(NEXT SEGMENT) EIGHT: Safe Until She Returns

FIVE: A Mother's Instinct

SIX: Okay. So I'm dead.

NINE: A Perfect, Beautiful Family

Exuberant Bodhisattva on Facebook
Erica on Twitter: @mypelvicfloor

Where is Emma Fillipoff (Five)

previous segments of Where is Emma Fillipoff

(NEXT SEGMENT) SIX: Okay. So I'm dead.

Five: A Mother's Instinct

Erica: "People say, oh you’d know if your kid was dead, but how would you know? People get news all the time that they didn’t know before they heard it."

Shelley: “I really don’t know. I don’t have a gut feeling. My gut is dead. People want to know, ‘What’s your gut? Your instinct? What’s your gut feeling?’ Well, my instinct, my gut is hope. I’m hoping that she’s okay and alive and that we’re gonna find her... My whole life has been by instinct. I raised my kids instinctively, I taught instinctively. I did everything by instinct, with my heart… I never thought about it, I always felt about it. But I can’t say what my gut is about this because… it’s dead. My instinct is gone. Because there are too many possibilities. And I’m too sick over it.”

During the months after Emma was last seen, Shelley stayed in Victoria, devoting her life to a relentless search. In the coverage on Emma’s disappearance, Shelley is at the forefront, handing out and hanging up posters, talking to the media and to anyone who might have seen or known her daughter. It rained every day, aggravating Shelley’s fibromyalgia. Divers searched the harbour for Emma’s body and found nothing. None of the tips or clues led to anything substantial. With each day, it became increasingly less likely that Emma would simply turn up, emerging from around a corner, or behind a tree. Still, Shelley remained single-pointed in her quest to find Emma. I asked her if she cried a lot. During those first two months, and since. The answer is no.

Shelley handing out posters on the West Coast
Source: cbc.ca

“I very seldom cry which is weird.” Shelley had been searching for Emma in Victoria for two months when she finally let herself weep. Her ex-husband James had called her to say that Emma’s dog Oscar had died. “I thought for a brief second, oh my God, maybe Emma just died.”

Back when Emma had called Shelley, asking her to come get her, in attempts to keep Emma on the phone, Shelley had said, “that’s wonderful. When I get off the phone, I’ll let Oscar know.” Emma had replied, “Oh that’s okay mom. Oscar already knows I’m coming.”

Shelley: “You know? She was like that. So when he died, I cried and I cried and I cried.”

End of Part Five.
-Written by Erica J. Schmidt

Where is Emma Fillipoff

SEVEN: She ran away because she fucking hates her parents.

EIGHT: Safe Until She Returns

NINE: A Perfect, Beautiful Family

Exuberant Bodhisattva on Facebook
Erica on Twitter: @mypelvicfloor

Where is Emma Fillipoff (One)

Where is Emma Fillipoff
One: The Grieving Mothers of Perth Ontario

On November 23, 2012, Shelley Fillipoff heard her phone ring around midnight. Immediately, she got the feeling that something was very wrong with one of her children. It was Emma, her 26-year-old daughter calling from Victoria, British Columbia. Emma was in tears and highly distressed.

“Mom, I want to come home,” she said. She wanted Shelley to fly out and get her.

“Of course,” Shelley said. She promised to book her flight as soon as they got off the phone.

“Are you booking your flight?” Emma asked. She seemed incredibly concerned. Once again, Shelley promised that she would as soon as she hung up.

“Right away, honey,” she promised. They hung up, and without wasting any time, Shelley booked her flight and packed to go get her daughter. Within a few hours, Emma called back.

“No, Mom, don’t come,” she said. “Not today.” She told Shelley that she wanted to figure things out for herself. Respecting her daughter’s request for privacy, Shelley cancelled her flight. This went on for four more days. An anguished Emma calling, begging her mom to come get her. Shelley booking her flight, packing her suitcase. And then Emma calls back, her mind changed. “No, Mom, don’t come. Not today.”

"Don't come. Not today, Mom, not today." These were the last words Shelley would ever hear her daughter speak. Emma called early on the morning of Wednesday, November 28.

At this point, Shelley could no longer ignore her instinct that something was terribly amiss. Her ex-husband and children urged her to heed Emma’s vacillating wishes, but Shelley got on a plane and flew across the country to bring her daughter home. She was still in the plane at 8 P.M. the last time Emma was seen. Shelley arrived at 11. By then, Emma had already vanished into the night. No one has any idea where she went.

“The days are unbearably long and yet it’s almost been three years.” Unbearably long, unimaginably horrible. This is how Shelley Fillipoff describes her life.

I met Shelley this July in her family home just outside of Lanark, a tiny village about ten kilometres from my hometown of Perth Ontario. Although Perth has been voted, “the prettiest town in Ontario,” I’ve always felt haunted by the community’s disturbing amount of tragedy. As I grew up, there seemed to be a disproportionate amount of pre-mature death and disturbing events. Fires, drugs, a double-murder suicide, a vice grip attack in a restaurant broom closet, a child pornography arrest, inordinate levels of cancer and countless young people who die suddenly of illness, accidents or suicide. Perhaps it’s just my morbid fixation on death, or maybe it’s because the community is so small. But whatever the reason, Perth has its share of grieving mothers. The day Emma disappeared, Shelley became one of them.

End of Part One

-Written by Erica J. Schmidt

Where is Emma Fillipoff