The Hell of Missing

"Sometimes only one person is missing yet the whole world seems depopulated"

Alphonse de Lamartine (1790-1869)

Speaking to a mother whose son went missing nearly two decades ago really provided me with a radically different perspective. How would any of us feel to return home and find that someone we expected to be there, was not there, and left no indication as to their whereabouts? How long would we wait to report someone missing? What would we do next? How long would we hope for their return? How would we cope when there were no leads, no sightings, nothing for the Police to follow-up? How would we feel to be told that the case was to be considered inactive?

Can we ever imagine the unimaginable? They say that to truly empathise with another's experience it is necessary to 'walk a mile in their moccasins'. I am having trouble trying to envisage what this journey might comprise.

"Absence from whom we love is worse than death, and frustrates hope severer than despair"

William Cowper

Every year police forces in the UK receive in the region of 210,000 reports of missing people. Whilst most are resolved relatively quickly, other disappearances continue for prolonged periods, leaving family members to cope with the pain of not knowing where their loved one is or what has happened to them.

We all have the right to go missing. The Charity Missing People provides support to those left behind when someone disappears whose experiences have been summarised as 'living in limbo' - suspended between the hope that their loved one will return, and the belief that the worst may have happened, unable to move in either direction as both are equally unknown. They live not with grief having been bereaved but with something more obscure, and less tangible - this has been described as 'ambiguous loss'.

"Ambiguous loss challenges us deeply. It defies our need for meaning."

Pauline Boss (2006)

It challenges our faith in a just world, a good world, a solid world — maybe our religious faith, too. It challenges our feeling that we have some kind of control over events, our sense of agency, of self. It calls into question our sense of identity as part of our web of relationships, our family systems. Who are we in relation to someone who is present and yet absent, or absent and yet present?

Missing People is an independent charity which relies on generous donations to answer every call for help.

There are lots of ways you can donate and every penny really will make a difference.

To help in the seach please visit:
www.missingpeople.org.uk/missing-people/donate

Comments

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