What remains.

The skin has been peeling off life a little lately.

Like the post-sunburn of old, before we thought to know it wasn’t just about pain but future melanomas. Peeling, we called it as our skin blistered, lifted and fell away. Sometimes we helped it along, tearing off great strips.

It’s December and Christmas is coming of course,  snaking its way towards us between the wars and the bombings and the killings and the famine and the refugee camps and the cyclones and the hurricanes and the economic crises and the constant and more recently acquired poverty.

‘Tis the season to be jolly.  To decorate, to cook, to eat, to drink, to spend. To gather together and celebrate.

Last week the hot winds gave me a sinus headache and when it got worse I laid on the couch for a bit and flicked the T.V. on. Instead of something mindless but strangely soothing I found myself watching a funeral service.

This is the funeral of Daniel Morcombe, who went missing nine years ago – to the date – just before his 14th birthday. He was one of three sons, he was a twin, and he was last seen waiting for bus to take him Christmas shopping.  One bus passed by and didn’t stop.

And then he disappeared. Completely. WIthout a trace. For almost eight years.

The whole country knew Daniel’s smiling face. In his disappearance he became  a national icon. An ordinary everyday family became famous as they walked the torturous and feared path they suddenly found themselves on.

What happened to Daniel?

No amount of searching could find him. His name, his photographs, this story were plastered across televisions and newspapers and the internet. His parents gathered themselves and made appeals and were interviewed and, in time, created The Daniel Morcombe Foundation which aimed to educate children about their personal safety,  to assist victims of crime, and to keep searching for Daniel. Their faces mapped their suffering. They aged before our eyes.

I read somewhere that Daniel’s mother, Denise, said she had taken to drinking for a while, letting the alcohol ease the anguish. She stopped, and let it all back in.

Christmases came. Christmases went. Daniel never came home.

And then, almost eight years into their vigil, there’s a development.  A man is arrested and charged over Daniel’s disappearance. The simple, factual charges rang out like bullet shots to his parent’s hearts. Murder. Child stealing. Deprivation of liberty. Indecent treatment of a child under 16. Interfering with a corpse.

A new search begins in a small defined section of bushland. Shoes are found. And a few random bones. In time, they will be scientifically proven to be Daniel’s.

Another year and a bit passes before these remains are given to the parents so that they can bury their son, whose fate they almost know. They want a resting place for him, they want a respectful and loving acknowledgement of his life and death.

And so they gather, the family, the friends, the neighbours. Nine years of waiting. Daniel’s school friends and best friends and twin brother are not young lads stretching out into their teenage years anymore. They are young men. They have left him behind, a way back and smiling boy.

There’s a lull in the service and an older woman, who I imagine to be Denise Morcombe’s mother, crosses from her seat to stand in front of Denise. They embrace, and the camera stays with them so we can watch Denise’s shoulders heave and shake, her head buried in the other woman’s shoulders. Bruce Morcombe, Daniel’s father, stands as always stoically beside. As always it has been his job to stand behind the microphone and speak.

I used think, in my younger life, that grief was something that disappeared over time. That it could be experienced and then managed. That time did heal all wounds so, eventually and of course, the pain went somewhere else. Far away.

The older I get, the more I know that I was delusional way back then. There is nowhere else for the pain to go. Grief is a wound that does get smaller and can seem to be healed some moments and some times.  But then, perhaps at the most unexpected of times, the wound breaks its boundary and the pain seeps and gushes out. The loss is again monumental, the absence unbearable, the why unanswered.

For the umpteenth time, Denise Morcombe wipes her face and collects what’s left of herself. For the umpteenth time, Bruce Morcombe breathes a deep breath, squares his shoulders and looks off into the distance.

It’s time to go off, un-filmed and un-saved, and bury what remains of their beautiful, beautiful boy.