PARENTS OF MISSING CHILDREN: THE WORST IS NOT KNOWING
LeParisien
http://www.leparisien.fr/faits-dive...e-est-de-ne-pas-savoir-30-09-2017-7296945.php
The pain of Maëlys's parents is the same as that of the parents who have lived or are still living through the tragedy of the unbearable wait. They agreed to tell us about it.
She was also in front of her television on Thursday evening, when the parents of Maëlys, who has been missing for over a month from a wedding in Isère, urged the principal suspect in a poignant appeal to "reveal what he knows".
The endless waiting, the doubt about her child's destiny... Tears that Valérie Lance knows only too well. In June 2011, her son Alexandre, 13 years old, disappeared in Pau (Pyrénées-Orientales). For three weeks, she stirred heaven and earth to find him, clung to the craziest clues, until horror reduced her hopes to nothing: the femur of Alexander, murdered and dismembered, had just been found in the river Gave de Pau...
Six years and two trials later, this hurting mother cannot help but follow the developments of the Maëlys case, which echoes her pain.
"I have a lot of compassion for these parents," she says, "I wish them all the best in finding their daughter, but I also wish that they may know...."
"The worst of it all," admits the one who was confronted with a horrifying truth, "the worst is not knowing." This" unbearable waiting " that Maëlys' mother, her voice shattered by emotion, spoke of on Thursday, is an unfathomable chasm in which every parent of a missing child tries, in his or her own way, not to disappear in.
"Relatives hold on by keeping active. Nothing is more insurmountable for a father or mother than to feel helpless," according to Hélène Romano, a doctor in psychopathology and author of the book "Accompanying the child victim to justice" (Ed. Dunod).
Valérie Lance, too, has known the sleepless nights, the life that goes by "like in a parallel world", her eyes fixed on the Internet in search of the slightest clue, telephone at hand night and day..."I had a notebook in which I wrote down everything as soon as someone called me, including some crazy trails. I even called on psychics, one of whom assured me to the very end that Alexander was alive... Because that's what I wanted to hear,"she says.
Hope feeds on everything, including a "form of rationalization at all costs that makes it possible to dispel the anguish of death," says Hélène Romano.
Alain Boulay, president of the Association of Parents of Child Victims (Apev), recalls the incredible impact of Natascha Kampusch's release in 2006, who spent eight years in a cellar in Austria. It has given back hope to the relatives of the missing, who now say that nothing is impossible," he says. "They consider their child to be alive until proven otherwise..." An unquestionable fact for Valérie Lance, who remembers registering Alexandre at the summer recreation centre, renewing his bus pass for the school year, "all those things we did as a ritual in June," she says.
In cases of disappearance, grief - not in the sense of death, but in the sense of loss - is impossible," Hélène Romano says. "We are talking about suspended mourning, like the families of victims of aerial crashes who, without bodies, keep up the crazy hope that their loved one may be alive somewhere..."
But time is a poison that erodes hope. That of Annie Audoye, after 26 years of "absence" from her daughter Marie-Hélène, who disappeared in May 1991 near Monaco, is still there... but it is tiny and so sad. "I have long wished for a confession because, by denying her death, the person who hurt my daughter also denies her life. Today, I am reduced to hoping that one day we will find a body, by chance," the mother of a family sobs. She fears, after her husband's death, that she may pass away without knowing the truth. For a month now, she too has identified with Maëlys' parents and, like them, is waiting for only one thing:
"Let him say what he knows."
BBM
