Jim Caniford clung to what little optimism he could.
The missing
People disappear all the time with little to no likelihood of ever being found, alive or dead. Not only in wars. The phenomenon occurs on almost unfathomable scales in natural disasters, such as this month's cyclone in Myanmar and the earthquake in China.
It also happens with other human-made calamities, like the attack on the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001, which left behind hundreds of surviving family members who yearned for any physical manifestation of their loved ones to be found in the rubble. That is why the excavation of Ground Zero became akin to a sacred rite.
University of Minnesota psychologist Pauline Boss coined the term "ambiguous loss" to describe occurrences when survivors are left without any trace of a death. Mourners, she says, have always had an almost primitive need to have a body, something to see, possibly hold, to accept the death as real. In cases where that isn't possible, she says, survivors must grapple with an anguishing ambiguity, the pairing of two opposing ideas: He's dead, but maybe not.
That paradox describes how the Canifords reacted to Jimmy's disappearance. Of the four, only Janice accepted that Jimmy was dead, and it gave her peace. She found solace in the fact that he had voluntarily served the Air Force and died; even as dementia began to cloud her mind in recent years, it comforted her to know he had been doing what he loved.
Jimmy's sister, Diana, had dreamt a few months after the plane's downing that her brother visited her and promised that he was dead and not suffering.
Yet she continued to believe he might have survived the fireball in Laos. She spun scenarios that he was living with a pretty wife in the jungle or somehow made it to the U.S. befogged by amnesia. Seeing a tall man in line at Disney World made her wonder, could that be Jimmy?
Not having hope, she felt, would be a betrayal so long as no one had physical evidence to the contrary. Whenever someone asked if she had siblings, she would say, "I have a brother who's missing."
Have, not had.
One of her worst days came on an autumn afternoon in 1978 when her family held a memorial service for her brother at All Saints' Episcopal Church in Frederick after the Air Force changed his status from missing to presumed killed, a switch that opened the door for survivors' benefits. (He also was promoted to senior master sergeant.)
