When someone is missing, what is a family supposed to do with an ordinary day? There is still food to buy, work to attend to, a birthday approaching. Making plans may feel necessary and somehow disloyal. Even the simplest question about the future can lead back to the person whose whereabouts remain unknown.
There is a particular cruelty in expecting people to organise a life around an absence, then expecting them to explain that absence repeatedly before anyone takes notice.
OHCHR reports that families of the disappeared are helping to shape a new Global Alliance initiative. The reported involvement matters, although it cannot by itself tell us how much influence those families will have or what the initiative will achieve. It does offer a starting point for thinking about what it means to involve people in decisions that concern their lives.
A family should be able to influence the search for answers without having to become permanently available as a witness to its own suffering. Being heard can itself become work: attending, explaining, finding words for something that may already occupy far too much of the day. An invitation to participate deserves scrutiny if participation becomes another obligation.
There is a complication here. Excluding families on the grounds that they have suffered enough would also take a decision away from them. Some may want to speak publicly and persistently. Others may want privacy, or simply a week in which they are not required to explain themselves. Those wishes may change.
Meaningful involvement must leave room for all of that. It should allow someone to step back without their relative becoming less important to the people responsible for pursuing answers.
This has a bearing on how we behave closer to home, too. Concern often arrives with an unspoken timetable. We can manage distress for a while; eventually we hope for a conclusion that makes conversation easier. The person living with uncertainty may have no conclusion to offer.
We need to be capable of continuing a relationship without demanding one. And any initiative inviting families into its work should face a practical test: if a family stops attending meetings, who keeps going on its behalf?