Missing (Jacob)

My oldest daughter wore this coat. She was a year and a half when Jacob Wetterling was murdered. Of course, we didn't know it yet. He was simply missing. His parents were forced to imagine places much more painful than death.

Now the family knows. The world knows. It has been suggested that this knowing is good. We can stop imagining horror around every corner. We know where it lives. It is contained. The family should feel better just knowing.

I don't know what Jacob's parents imagined all those sleepless nights. Twenty-seven years worth. I don't know if the truth they learned last week is any better. Now they can think about exactly what happened to their child. The sight and smell and sound of his killer telling the story is seared into their souls. He has become what they imagine when they close their eyes at night and nightmares come instead of sleep.

Other parents lie awake, too, fighting demons in the dark because their children have been taken by predators as loathsome as Danny Heinrich. Children who disappeared into addiction, and never returned. Who became commodities for sale in the sex trade. Who were taken by mental illness.

Some parents don't know why they lost their children. They just know that they walked away. Separated themselves from their family, refusing to look back.

But all those nighttime hours—full of hideous images, which wash over prone forms like ocean waves upon a tiny atoll—accomplish nothing. In time, there is no awake. No asleep. Only a longing for something that will never come. Peace.

The Wetterlings must have had these nights. Over and over again. Yet somehow, when the light came to stab their eyes in the morning, they got up. They did everything they could for their lost son, and then went on to help other lost children.

The thing is, we can all open our eyes. We can all get up, and maybe some of us can help the lost children.