It's over. The missing AirAsia plane has been found. Debris has been spotted off the coast of Indonesia, as have bodies of the victims.
Angela Anggi Ranastianis' papa will not be coming home.
This is a moment of great sadness. And yet we also feel a sense of release, a relief that the outcome has been determined and the grieving can finally begin.
This is what MH370 has taught us. We once imagined that the worst possible scenario is a plane that crashes -- be it due to a bomb or pilot error. Now we know that there is no greater horror than a plane that goes missing. A plane that simply disappears, taking with it the lives of all of its passengers but leaving behind a dreadful limbo where their families are still waiting to mourn, trapped by the fish-hook of hope.
Reuters
Aviation crisis consultant Ken Jenkins, who worked with families of the Malaysian Airline families, says, "When you don't have the aircraft or any wreckage or any confirmation of what happened to them, the mind will certainly work with you to say maybe they are alive. Maybe the plane landed safely somewhere and that certainly is within the realm of possibility but not a very high possibility."
That hope is now dead along with all the passengers of the AirAsia flight. In its wake, however, the loss opens the door to healing.
More than 9 months after MH370 disappeared, those left behind are still walking around with open wounds. They have endured months of false sightings and conspiracy theories, see-sawing between the desire to see their loved ones again and the desperate need to be able to just let go. If they could only just please know….
Thirty three days after it vanished into thin air, Malay Mukherjee, who lost his son and daughter-in-law, was no longer hoping for a miracle but for closure, as he told the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation
Mukherjee said he had hoped the Malaysian prime minister's announcement that the plane had been "lost" in a remote part of the Indian Ocean would bring closure, but it hasn't. Now he's counting on the discovery of wreckage — as well as the plane's black box — so he can move on with his life.
That was in April. In December, when the Wall Street Journal spoke to him, Mukherjee was busy trying to obtain a death certificate for his not-officially dead son so he can assume guardianship of his grandchildren.
But others are less able to move on, and remain in the thrall of desperate hope. “I haven’t grieved yet,” Sarah Bajc, who lost her partner, told WSJ, “I haven’t accepted that he’s dead.…I owe it to him to find out the truth.”
This then is the dreadful gift those drifting pieces of debris offer: the gift of truth. Better this than the anguish that is to never, ever know. As Jenkins says, "People can handle the truth, they just want to know what the truth is." Truth may not always prevail, but it will always set us free.
We offer our heartfelt condolences to the families of the passengers of Flight QZ8501.
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