There is a big difference between…
There is a big difference between the missing and the dead.
Dead is dead. Finished. There is no more to be done, nothing left to discover.
The dead person cannot change anything. Their family and friends have a chance to mourn, to hold a funeral, to try and live their lives without them.
When someone is dead, however much people may or may not want them to be, there is no getting around this fact.
They have, most important of all, closure.
But when someone is missing, they become punctuation.
A question mark, rhetorical, never answered unless they are found.
And so many people, it seems, are never found.
This might be through choice—they have run away, started a new life, escaped a terrible past—or it might be through force—they were kidnapped, attacked, buried in a forgotten spot in the hopes of never being discovered—but either one means they may never be found again.
And indeed, there is a third option: pure accident, a decision or consequence that has meant they have fallen between the cracks, purely coincidentally.
People fall into the sea and are never rescued.
There are people caught on camera walking into one place and never emerging from the exits.
Whatever the reason for their disappearance, they are now in a state of limbo.
Schrodinger’s person, alive and dead, dead and alive, and impossible to know which.
Such a state of living, for those left behind to wonder, is unbearable. What happened to them? Was it at this time? Was it something dreadful, or are they perhaps out there, happy and healthy and somehow okay?
Scenarios run through your head: On a birthday, they will send me some kind of message. I will spend all day looking out for one. That didn’t work? It will next year. Or maybe Christmas, or Valentine’s Day, or Mother’s Day, or Father’s Day, or, or, or . . .
Nothing. But that’s alright. It doesn’t mean anything. They might still come back.
There are stories, aren’t there, of people locked away for decades, who are then found again?
Maybe that will happen. But no, not to my loved one.
They won’t have such horrors. If it meant I could see them again, would I really want that?
So then, stop it, focus on the positive.
Others say you have to move on, but they don’t understand.
Life has become an inhale of breath, anticipating an exhale of relief that never comes. There is no moving on from breathing.
As you can see, this state of uncertainty is rather uncomfortable.
It does not allow someone to live a normal life.
Feelings are bottled up as the pressure of conforming to what society expects eventually becomes the new way of pretending, but underneath, there they are, bubbling and bubbling and bubbling.
For a charm of powerful trouble,
Like a hell-broth boil and bubble.
It’s enough to make one mad.