Jaye Marie and Anita Dawes

My son, who is now thirty-three, celebrates his eighth re-birthday today.

On July 4th, 2009, normality imploded.

‘We have your son’… four words changed the world for me. It had changed for my son some hours earlier. I had been in blissful ignorance until the phone rang and the voice said, ‘We have your son.’

The world changed beyond recognition.

I have tried, many times, to speak or to write in some way that captures even a shadow of the blank horror of that day. Words fail. To say that my heart, mind and body screamed for days sounds melodramatic… to say that, at the same time, there was an eye of untouchable, unreachable calm within the scream sounds impossible… Sanity, I think, was only protected by the impossibility of it all. Yet we had to move through each moment, facing those impossibilities head on.

To see a child…