I believe their idea was to take away not just their life but their identity you know, no trace of you left. You're eliminated. There's no trace of you left. There's no burial. There's no grave to go to. You've disappeared. - Sean Megraw
After persistent pressing by his family the body of missing man Gerry Daly has been recovered from a bog in Co Meath, about twenty miles from where he lived in Bailieborough, Co Cavan. Mr Daly disappeared three years ago and despite hopes being raised on a number of occasions, his family were left to stare into an abyss of nothingness; no insight, no relief from that unremitting itch of needing to know what happened. Ultimately, his mother went to her own grave heartbroken without ever finding out what happened to her son.
The remaining family had accepted that he was dead and simply longed for the body to be returned to them for proper funerary arrangements. His sister Belinda told The Journal, ‘we believe at this point that he has come to an unsavoury end. We’re looking to have him brought home so we can bury him.’
Now that the trauma caused by a secret grave, has been brought to a close, the family in a statement on the Facebook page dedicated to finding Gerry's remains, said:
It is with heavy hearts and great sadness that we let you know that our brother, Gerard, has been located. We wish to offer our sincere thanks to all of you who have supported us in our search for our brother over the past three years. At this time our family is working to come to terms with this new turn of events and to begin the grieving process. Your kinds thoughts and prayers have helped us come this far and will continue to carry us through the next phase of our ordeal.
The case had been raised on The Pensive Quill, shortly before Christmas 2011 at the request of the family. Some time later a sister of the missing man, Belinda Daly, also wrote on the Quill in a bid to push matters along.
Neither these efforts nor other probes bore fruit. Each time I spoke with the family the story was the same, trails as cold as the unknown grave Gerry was entombed within. Yet the family never allowed the disappointment to derail the determination to recover his body. Yesterday's discovery is the result of both familial loyalty and persistence.
Unless the missing person turns up safe and sound, there is no happy ending to these cases, just closure. While limited, closure is the optimum outcome when all possibilities other than living hourly with the open wound that not knowing brings, have been exhausted. With the recovery of Gerry Daly’s remains his family will have recouped something of its devastating loss.
The family, while deriving much relief from the knowledge that the body of Gerry Daly has been retrieved from its secret grave, is deeply upset at the descent on the story by what the writer Martin Amis once termed “pain vultures”. Plenty of acerbic commentary from shock jocks and gutter press gurriers now that the outcome is a fait accompli but previously not the slightest inclination to assist the family in securing the accomplishment they needed so badly. To them the life of Gerry Daly is something to wax outraged about: his family indifferently viewed as the detritus of a profitable news line.
Whether the result of gangland enforcement or IRA war crimes, there is nothing to be said in mitigation of burying people in secret graves, whatever their alleged transgression, sometimes even without the dubious benefits of a kangaroo court. It constitutes the infliction of a double death on the family left behind: the demise of a loved one and the extinction of hope. Their fate is to be condemned to the punishment of Tantalus, permanent pallbearers to an unbearable grief they can never unshoulder because there is no grave in which to place it.
There can be no coffin more heavy than an empty one.
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