Pain of MH370 ‘eats us up’

Anguish continues for relatives as search for missing plane may be called off

THE PAIN of not knowing what happened to relatives aboard Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 is undminished two years after the plane disappeared. Now worries that the search may be called off are adding to the woes of victims' friends and family.

Grace Nathan put on a brave smile and a firm handshake but the look in her eyes belied the pain and anguish that she has lived with for the past two years.

Grace, a lawyer in her late 20s, clearly remembered how she instinctively dialled the number of her mother’s cellphone upon learning she had passed her bar exams in late 2014.

The phone did not ring. She burst into tears as she remembered that her mother, Anne Daisy, was among 239 people aboard Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 that disappeared without a trace on March 8, 2014 about an hour after taking off from Kuala Lumpur for Beijing.

“I thought the pain would just go away in time but it just lingers and continues to eat us up,” she said. “It’s been like a roller coaster, up and down, up and down, but it never really goes away,” she said, her voice at times cracking with emotion. “It is impossible to move on because we don’t know what happened, so there’s nothing to accept.”

Grace, who leads an annual commemoration for the disappeared aircraft, said there was less participation this year, compared to last year when there was greater enthusiasm to keep alive the memories of MH370.

“Everybody feels they are becoming more and more dead inside,” she said. “It’s all like, oh my God, why is this still happening?”

Grace admitted the stress and emotional swings she has been through during the past two years have taken their toll on her.

She said that on several occasions, she could not find her way to her office, where she has been working for more than a year.

“I had to check my phone to find my

MONDAY MARCH 7 2016 office address. I forgot what floor I work on. It’s ridiculous. It’s not even a big building,” she said.

Adding to the misery of the MH370 kin is the concern that the government will soon stop searching for the missing plane, believed to have crashed in a remote part of the Southern Indian Ocean.

Voice MH370, an organisation of relatives of those aboard the missing aircraft, urged the international search team to press on until the plane is found. – ANA-dpa