Gone

I can’t conceive of the pain, the grief that friends and family of passengers go through when a plane crashes.

“Will they find my loved one in the wreckage?” “How can they identify the remains?” and so on.

But then how does one cope if there are no remains — of passengers or the plane?

The world continues to search for Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 and the 239 on board. One search team thought they spotted a door from the plane in the waters off Vietnam, but it turned out to be ordinary debris. An oil slick could have been a clue, but it was from a passing ship.

The flight took off from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, bound for Beijing. This is thousands of miles from the Bermuda Triangle, but the plane quite suddenly disappeared. The plane and those 239 souls. What hell for their families. They want to know — as do we all — with the immense amount of modern technology at hand, how can you lose a 777?

I sat on the tarmac of that same Kuala Lumpur airport for what seemed like hours waiting for them to figure out how to turn on the electricity, but my plane didn’t disappear. My family wasn’t left with unanswerable questions.

It’s too late to pray for survivors, so let’s just pray for answers. There are 239 families waiting.

I’m Pat McMahon.

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