MIND MOVES: The ultimate parental nightmare must be the disappearance of a child. This trauma is described as being like no other: as a hysteria of hope and despair, belief and defeat and heart-squeezing terror until the child is found, writes Marie Murray.
There is the immediate panic of the baby missing from the pram - mere moments after the toddler disappears from sight, terror prevails. With older children, alarm is delayed: it is compounded by any number of possibilities as to where they might be before dread becomes certainty that the child is truly gone.
Noticing your child is missing - not holding your hand, not in the shop, not playing with toys, not in the garden, not in the house, not nearby with friends - is a slow-motion moment, frozen in time, in which the nightmare begins. Life as lived before the disappearance cannot be regained.
Of course, it is not just children but any family member who might not return one day. The disappearance may be of an adult son or daughter, a young mother or father, an elderly parent, or a husband or wife. Thousands of Irish families have experienced the sudden disappearance of a family member - as many as two-and-a-half thousand people may disappear each year.
This means that each day, someone in Ireland - who has gone out to work, to the shops for a paper, off for a pint, out to meet friends or just around the corner for a carton of milk - simply and inexplicably disappears and the nightmare of fear for the family begins.
It may be a husband attacked, a son running away, a daughter abducted, a teenager mysteriously vanishing from sight, or a wife who goes missing forever. It may be a parent deserting the family or the tragedy of a child snatched by a parent from a parent in a "tug of love" from which the child never returns.
In the case of adolescent disappearance, families describe searching for clues to explain an absence.
There is always fear of abduction, fear of assault, fear of accident or injury and the unspoken, unspeakable fear of suicide. This is why immediate reporting is important, as is contacting other family members and friends. You should check phones for the last call made, look at the Internet for sites visited, and investigate public and private transport services and bank and credit card withdrawals.
It is also important to see if passport and money are missing and insist that footage from every security camera the person may have passed is checked. Immediate provision of photographs for media reports is crucial.
Many say that death of a family member is even easier than disappearance. And there is particular psychological trauma when the disappearance follows an argument. This creates a grim divide between two terrible alternatives: the person was abducted, coerced, led away, held captive, even murdered or alternatively, the person chose to leave the family in uncertainty forever. Neither possibility is palatable. Neither allows the normal process of natural grief.
Missing means that there may be days, weeks, months, even years of wondering and waiting. Perhaps the cruellest irony is that, as time goes by, the family changes until neither the house to which the person may return, the person who is returning, or the people to whom he or she returns will be the same.
Time seems to change everything except the pain of longing - encapsulated in the concluding line of Missing, Máiréad Tuohy Duffy's poem imagining the moment of return: "Come into my open arms, Oh! Child, how we missed you".
But for those whose longing is not fulfilled, whose arms stretch out to emptiness, there comes a point where the most dreaded news is the information families need most to hear - that the nightmare is over, that the person is safe from suffering, even if that safety lies within the cessation of life.
Death is beyond control. Disappearance is uncertain. The language of bereavement is one of acceptance. The language of disappearance is one of hope. The grief of disappearance is an obstructed grief. Not knowing invites the worst imagining. Grief is distorted and thwarted.
Death has an explanation, a funeral, a grave, a place to visit and the religious rituals that help to heal. Disappearance denies ritual. This makes the sculpture by Ann Mulrooney in Kilkenny Castle, cast from the hands of relatives of missing persons, an important commemorative place.
Each day, someone in Ireland grieves and hopes that the next sound in the hallway - along with the next footstep on the path, the knock on the door, the ring of the bell, the card in the post or the voice on the phone - may be that of the person who has disappeared.
It is to be hoped that our vigilance and the websites for missing people may reduce the numbers who endure this terrible pain.
mmurray@irish-times.ie
Marie Murray is director of psychology at St Vincent's Hospital in Fairview, Dublin.
The joint initiative between the Garda Síochána and the International Centre for Missing and Exploited Children (ICMEC) and the www.missingkids.ie website are invaluable. The National Missing Persons Helpline number is 1850-442552 (Monday to Friday, 10 a.m. to 4 p.m.). See also the website www.missing.ws