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For the family of missing loved ones, time doesn’t heal, it adds ups.
In Australia, police receive more than 38,000 missing persons reports each year.
While most people are found within a short period of time, about 2600 have remained missing long term.
Missing Persons Week kicks off on Monday and there are calls for greater investment in resources to help.
The Missing Persons Advocacy Network (MPAN) has been working with affected families to develop world-first therapeutic cards.
The “hope narratives” cards help people struggling with emotions that can’t be easily “managed with standard grief counselling practices”.
The set of 145 tangible cards each display a sentiment from someone who has experienced what it’s like to live with, and survive, “the unending not-knowing”.
MPAN chief executive Loren O’Keeffe said all three categories of the cards — hard truths, coping mechanisms and hopes — capture the feelings of a community that typically feels unheard.
“When a loved one goes missing, there is no right way to deal with it. You oscillate from hope to hopelessness, overwhelmed by the physical, mental and emotional burden, often feeling no one understands what you’re going through,” she said.
“It’s OK to feel uncertainty, hope, exhaustion, numbness — or even anger at your loved one for going missing.
“The hope narratives help bring out real and authentic emotions and in doing so, validate experiences in a really meaningful way.
“By supporting loved ones with this very special set of cards, our aim is to address a complicated grief that’s historically been a misunderstood area of mental health for thousands of Australians.”
Last year, 53,000 people were reported missing across Australia, an average of 145 people a day.
It’s an increase of more than 30 per cent in the last three years.
For the family of missing traveller Theo Hayez, the uncertainty is difficult.
“You don’t know what happened and you can’t start your grieving because you have no answers,” Theo’s cousin, Lisa Hayez said.
Leaving Byron Bay party bar Cheeky Monkeys in May 2019, the 18-year-old Belgian backpacker headed for the bush around 11pm, phone data show, but was soon gone without a trace.
“We have to wake up every day and live through it,” Ms Hayez said.
It’s the same feeling for Marion Barter’s daughter, Sally Leydon.
Barter was reported missing to Byron Bay police in October 1997 after she failed to call and wish her son a happy birthday.
“We’re up to over 10,000 days my mum’s been missing,” Leydon said.
“I’ve had to do a lot of the searches and a lot of the background work myself.”
A $500,000 dollar reward is in place for information to help solve the disappearances of Hayez and Barter.
“It never leaves me, it was my mum,” Leydon said.
Source: 9News
