READ RUTH’S COLUMN
THERE can be nothing worse than burying your child. No pain that can compare to losing a life you brought into the world, sustained, protected and loved without limit.
And yet there may be something worse. Something more painful. Something that stretches the sinews of what can be borne, before the human spirit is shattered into pieces.
And that is not knowing whether your child is alive or dead.
Not knowing if they are experiencing terror or pain. Not knowing if they are reaching in the dark for a mother’s embrace that never comes.
It is a situation too monstrous to be imagined, but when it is presented as happening to someone else, there is nothing you can do to stop that same imagination chilling you to the bone.
The torment is the mental equivalent of passing a terrible accident, all fibres of your being scream to turn away but you cannot stop looking.
That is why such terrible, tragic, horrific cases resonate down the years. Whether it is Winnie Johnson – the mother of 12-year-old Keith Bennett – who spent decades begging Moors murderer Ian Brady to tell her what happened to her boy, or now Kate and Gerry McCann reacting to the news a new suspect has been named in the hunt for their missing daughter, Madeleine.
Madeleine McCann, a name for ever etched on the public consciousness. A beautiful, blonde, smiling girl – three years old in people’s minds, but who would be 17 now.
The story has a banal horror; delightful family holiday blown apart when parents who are having dinner in their resort nip back to check on the kids, only to find one of them missing.
No parent can read such a sentence without feeling the same lurch of dread and confusion Kate McCann must have felt.
The all-night search, stretching into days. Mobilising holidaymakers to help the police check every outhouse, shed, culvert or cave that a disorientated toddler could try to find shelter in. The dawning realisation that she could have been actively targeted – and utter devastation at considering what that might mean.
How the McCanns have kept their strength these past 13 years, I do not know.
How must they have felt having to leave Portugal and return home, trusting Portuguese police to keep the hunt going?
HOW did they keep their temper, their dignity when the same police force, which admitted mishandling the scene and potentially destroying DNA and evidence of an abduction, then named both of the parents as official suspects – without any evidence.
Imagine being suspected of hurting or selling your own child and having to justify your actions, while all the time knowing every second spent questioning you is time wasted not searching for your daughter. The suspect tag was quietly dropped, after months of wasted police time.
As Kate said in 2017, on the tenth anniversary of Madeleine’s disappearance: ‘You don’t realise how strong you are until you have no option.
‘We could spend all our time and energy trying to defend ourselves by correcting inaccuracies and lies, but then we would have no strength left to look for Madeleine, look after our other children and to live our life.’
The one thing about not knowing is that there is always hope.
But hope can be a torment as well as a comfort.
Keeping the flame of hope flickering takes a strength all of its own. Last week came the breakthrough of a new suspect – a convicted paedophile who is currently serving a long sentence in a German jail.
He had been living in a campervan near where Madeleine was taken in Praia da Luz.
The family’s spokesman says this breakthrough feels ‘potentially very significant’.
Just as I cannot imagine how the McCann family have endured the not knowing, I find it impossible to know what hearing such news must feel like.
What I do know – and what parents across the country will similarly be feeling – is the urgent need to hold my own child closer tonight.