Telegraph: The search for a missing child can never end

**bb1** Sat Oct 20, 2012 10:24 pm

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/madeleinemccann/9620298/Ben-Needham-April-Jones-Madeleine-McCann...-The-search-for-a-missing-child-can-never-end.html

Ben Needham, April Jones, Madeleine McCann... The search for a missing child can never end

Hopes of finding Ben Needham, the 21-month-old who vanished in 1991, have gained fresh impetus, but his parents will never have stopped looking

By Judith Woods8:00PM BST 19 Oct 2012
April Jones was taken almost three weeks ago. Madeleine McCann has been gone since 2007. Ben Needham went missing 21 years ago. Missing, presumed dead – by all but their families, for whom hope is the only consolation at a time of unthinkable grief.
How can any of us whose lives have been untouched by anything so catastrophic begin to imagine how these bereft parents feel?
I try, yet all I can recall is the moment when my daughter was lost in the supermarket as a toddler, and then found. She had been alone for barely two minutes, yet she was wild-eyed with panic, her small body racked with sobs, tears coursing down her hot, flushed cheeks.
She was distraught, a cub gone astray. My embrace was fiercely loving, viscerally protective, like any mother’s, but then the moment passed and the adrenalin ebbed away because she was safe, because it was over.
How unspeakably amplified those emotions after hours, not minutes, days not hours? I truly cannot bear to think of a child’s terror at being taken, snatched, lost beyond rescue.

Months and years may diminish the shock for the parents but not the crushing sense of bereavement and helplessness. Children are precious. The most precious things we can ever possess – a philospher might aver they don’t belong to us. But mothers know they do. For ever.
And that is why the parents of Ben and Madeleine and April still look, and will continue looking, until the day they die, or the day their child is found and the frantic, manic anguish becomes something else, something fixed and heavy, anchoring their hearts to a little grave.
The search for Ben Needham, the 21-month-old who vanished on the Greek island of Kos in 1991, has gained fresh impetus, with the discovery of a mound of earth near the site of his disappearance. The soil is being lifted and sifted in the search for his body, even as his mother insists on her website, helpfindben.co.uk, that she remains convinced he is alive.
Online, there are photofit pictures of Ben and of Madeleine, projecting how they might look now, urging us to stay watchful, keep vigilant. Are any of these children still alive?
Bitter experience would suggest they are not, but instinct and blind faith combine to make a far more formidable and life-affirming force.
After any tragedy, the shockwaves are felt through the immediate community and beyond. It may take many years – decades – for a town to recover.
We don’t forget, any more that we forgive. How can we? Oprah Winfrey-style platitudes – “You can use tragedy as a catalyst for positive change” or “Begin the process of healing and see where life leads you” – have no place when a child is gone.

There are those who ask what can be learnt when a family is robbed of its future? Is the lesson that a gate should have been locked, a door barred? Or that the tentacles of evil can reach our children no matter where we are – in the streets by our homes, the sun-kissed idylls where we take our holidays?
There will come a point where the children of Machynlleth will once again play outside, just as there came a time when the children of Dunblane returned to school, the memory of Thomas Hamilton’s slaughter of the innocents still present, but rendered less potent by the sheer indomitability of the human spirit.
The reality – however brutal it may sound – is that we cannot remain in a state of paralysis for ever. As a community – a society – we acknowledge what has taken place, but, however slowly, we gradually get on with our lives.
But just as it is our responsibility to move forward, so is it a mother’s right to stand still. For when she refuses to give up her vigil for her child, she does so on behalf of all of us.