MAY 17 — Isn't it just a rollercoaster for the loved ones of the missing people aboard the vanished MH370, on the sunken South Korean ferry and Nigeria’s abducted schoolgirls?
Crushing incidents leave families and friends limping through life. But this kind of loss can also happen when someone walks out the door and never comes back.
None of us has the strength to receive bad news and even if we say that “if something happened to someone I love, I would die” – you don’t. You will just cry, grieve, hope and be remorseful.
When my live-in companion passed on 14 years ago, I began writing a book on grief recovery and learning to live with the loss of a loved one. I never finished the book because I have still not come to terms with her death.
If I had completed my book, I would have had a way in to console my colleague Thasha Jayamanogaran who lost her brother in a road accident recently.
Apart from sending her a condolence text message, I did not go for the funeral. I know it was wrong not to go, but that’s just me – a ‘coward’ when it comes to deaths.
This week, I dug up my 61-page script that deals with how to heal from grief, and to find gifts from the deepest places of despair following the death of the youngest in my family of 11, Jerry.
Jerry, 58, walked out of my life more than 20 years ago and never came back, so you can imagine the devastation of us never having reunited. Maybe, I will please my publisher by completing the book in Jerry’s honour.
Coincidentally, on Wednesday, I was invited to meet a very low-key psychologist from India who specialises in “ambiguous loss”, a distinctive treatment for sorrow involving no bodily proof of death in which people hug to the hope that the missing are still alive.
He was here at the invitation of a close friend of a family whose loved one was among the 239 people on MH370 that disappeared on March 8 during a flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing. He asked for anonymity to secure the privacy of his clients.
My first question: How do you mourn the missing? His reply: “Pure sorrow. When loved ones are presumed dead, families are caught between the hope of them coming back and the grief they might not.
”In the case of MH370, there is no closure even if they find the plane. The anguish is they have no body to bury. Doubt lingers until there is evidence of remains or DNA,” he said.
The families of the 28 people still missing after the South Korean ferry went to the bottom of the sea 31 days ago on April 16, too, do not have a body to bury. To the next-of-kin of 276 people confirmed dead, there has been closure.
The Indian psychologist said a similar grief was being endured by the families of more than 200 schoolgirls who were abducted by Nigeria’s militant Islamist group Boko Haram — which means ‘Western education is forbidden’ — on April 14. They don’t know if the girls would ever be found.
So how long do families have to wait before a missing person is declared dead? Many common law jurisdictions have set seven years after which an individual is presumed dead if there is no evidence to the contrary.
Still, having a memorial depends on the family. Missing couple Rod and Mary Burrows, who were among six Australians on MH370, had their memorial on May 4.
Either way, it would be enormously hard for a family to make that choice because closure only comes when those missing or their remains are found.
It’s a slog of wanting to believe and feeling an empty sense of hope and misery.
It’s probably one of the worst things that can happen to anybody, yet 71 days today after the Boeing 777 vanished, we and the rest of the world seem to be slowly forgetting the lost MH370.
It’s probably the greatest aviation mystery and while the search goes on for the passenger jetliner in the Indian Ocean and families of the presumed victims are demanding answers, the story that gripped the globe has begun to disappear from the radar of the world news media.
In recent days, we have had Prime Minister Datuk Seri Najib Razak admitting to missteps in the search for MH370 — including air traffic controllers launching the search and rescue operation after a lapse of four hours — in an opinion piece published in the Wall Street Journal.
On May 3, US President Barack Obama, in dousing his country’s news media at the annual White House Correspondents’ Association dinner, told the audience he was a little jet-lagged from his recent trip to Asia, which included a stop in Malaysia.
“The lengths we have to go to, to get CNN coverage these days,” he said, cracking a skewed joke, “I think they’re (CNN) still searching for their table.”
Slipping into the role of comedian-in-chief to take jabs at journalists, he used the occasion to declare open season on the media, including CNN and its extensive coverage of the missing Malaysia Airlines Flight 370.
Obama’s remarks on MH370 at the dinner known in Washington circles as “nerd prom” gained global prominence. That’s only because the US president spoke, albeit in jest.
Well, you might ask what else is there to do? Lots. Think grief.
Malaysia appears lame at handling and recognising emotional problems. Malaysians must be told how to manage emotions and express grief.
* This is the personal opinion of the columnist.
