For Damien

You visit my thoughts every day.  Sometimes in my dreams I see you smiling and for a moment I believe your safe with us again.  With the cruel light of day the vision, & happiness it brought to my weary heart, fades away and the cold reality washes over me.  Your gone.  It’s been a long time.  In my heart you live forever 16.  My hope is one day, in any way we can, we will find you and bring you home. Always and forever in my heart.  Mumx

Perception

 It may be difficult to grasp  but….

Why we are still talking about this.  So many people still go missing it’s hard to keep up with it.  Many return fairly soon. But so many don’t. It is very real and sobering. 23 years has passed since our son, Damien, vanished off the face of the earth. Families of recent missing family members look at us in awe and dread.  We (and sadly too many others) are the poster family for what they fear the most.  They could be us in years to come. 

 

It’s assumed we have healed the wounds by now.  Although it will soon be 24 years, in every way,  it is still November 3 1996, the day we found he was gone from our lives.  We calculate life events by the date marker Damien vanished. It is raw but we have learned to function in and around it. The pain still exists.   In our hearts we are desperately waiting to find him again.  We don’t want pity or attention.  We need help from the community to remember him and to give those who might know what did happen the chance to find it in their hearts to tell us.  Or, we pin our hopes on finding his remains.  How perverse to have a need to find your child’s bones?  But it’s reality for us long term families of the missing.  If you can say hope?  That’s what we want.  Our loved one back in the fold.  Respectfully placed at rest.  

 Website:  www.damiennettles.uk 

Author: The Boy Who Disappeared ISBN: 1789460719

Publisher John Blake Books

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Struggles on the road back to my life

 

As time wears on you learn to live with the loss and surrounding anxieties.  It is so difficult to stop searching when it has been my only career for the past 23 years. I have been immersed in my missing son’s case.  I know he is not coming home.  The best I can hope for is we find his remains and lay him to rest.  We will probably never know what happened.  But how to return to some semblance of normality is a huge struggle.  I share my experience to help with others in similar situations.  Assisting organizations who are helping with the missing issue is one way.  But its not enough.  I have been pro-active with social media and created a petition for improved investigations of the missing.  I wrote a book looking from the inside out of our missing son’s case.   I have consciously  heaped more on my shoulders.   I feel it is time to throw in the towel and go back to a “normal” life.  Whatever that is.  But I just can’t let this go.  So I come back to it again and again to try to effect change and offer some input shed some light and validate my son existed and pray its not all for naught.  My son set me on this path.  God willing it wont be for nothing.  Damien has to count for something in his 16 years of life.  

I has been, and still is, a life sentence.