The silent suffering of dignified Alice Cairns
LISTEN to Alice Cairns on radio last week, describing a parent’s worst nightmare. Listen to her plain words, her remarkable faith and dignity but above all to the long painful pauses, the ellipses and half-finished sentences full of heartbreak and suffering . It’s a cliché to say that words can’t express the true depth of human emotion but silence, as some of our playwrights show us, can say it all. There’s not much more to be said when you’ve waited for thirty years for your child to come home and it was all in vain. Or in Alice Cairns’s case, when you have stopped waiting.
Only that you gave up hope of a happy ending on your husband’s death.
That he gave up long before you but that, in any case, you couldn’t talk about it in the early years as it was literally too hard for words. And that it still is.
Most of us know what it’s like to lose a child for a few minutes. Imagine that horror and fear played out, day after day, year after year.
But while learning to live without someone who may or may not still need you is one thing; coping with the cacophony of false leads, hoaxes and tip-offs about their whereabouts must also be a burden.
Presumably for the sake of sanity, families like the Cairns learn to keep their distance, to take each wave of loud speculation with a proverbial pinch of salt.
But there must still be a part of their hearts that leaps in excitement, a portion of their deepest, most buried hopes that flickers into life, even if the latest ‘breakthrough’ seems to fly in the face of reason.
ALICE Cairns’s son was an innocent and conscientious youngster, still finding his feet in his new school. His mitching off school to go to a radio station is completely out of character for him and alien for her. The widespread anticipation last week when gardaí seemed about to solve the mystery of Philip’s disappearance must have been terrible for his family.
The gardaí had a witness at the scene of the crime – a woman of remarkable ‘courage’, as they put it – a deathbed confession of sorts and sophisticated technology to give vital DNA evidence about the lost boy’s schoolbag.
Given that gardaí never show their full hand, it seemed certain that they had more evidence up their sleeve.
But as the week unfolded, as more information was drip-fed to the public of how ‘two or three’ schoolgirls could have left Philip’s schoolbag down the laneway and fresh digs planned on properties owned by Cooke, the weight of evidence suddenly seemed very light indeed.
It pointed less to a breakthrough than an excuse for a public appeal in the run up to the 30th anniversary of Philip’s disappearance.
A fresh appeal for information is always worthwhile but why it had to be dressed up in fevered talk of prime suspects and witnesses is a mystery. The DNA traces on Philip’s schoolbag have still not been examined – it beggars belief that the gardaí did not wait to see what secrets the bag may reveal before going public with their theory.
Mrs Cairns’s calm interview brought us to our senses. Despite all the well-meaning chatter and speculation, her son is still gone and all she wants now is to give him a Christian burial. Someone out there can help her. If they have a shred of decency and humanity, they will give this strong and silent woman some peace.