54 Time Sept. 2–9, 2019
her second child and on vacation in Thai-
land with her 1-year-old daughter Mira
when a tsunami crashed into the coastline
on Dec. 26, 2004. The disaster affected
14 countries and killed an estimated
230,000 people.
Gudmundsson was at home in Sweden
when she saw the news. At first she didn’t
think her daughter and granddaughter
could be in danger. But then Linda didn’t
answer her phone.
“After some days I began to real-
ize what happened. But even in that
time, I thought, I know my daughter;
she is 30 years old, athletic, strong and
very stubborn,” Gudmundsson says. “I
thought she must be somewhere with
broken legs or arms or no voice. I went
through it many, many times with differ-
ent scenarios. It was terrible to not know
anything.”
Carina Heeke, a psychologist spe-
cializing in grief at the Freie Uni-
versity Berlin, has studied the dif-
ferences between relatives of those
missing and those confirmed dead.
She found that the people who display
the most trauma are those who cling
to hope that their loved one is alive.
“We assume that hope is a good thing,”
she tells TIME. “But the problem is that
although there may be hope, the person
still is not there. So usually it comes with
a lot of consequences.”
For many, the search begins to con-
sume their lives. In Mexico, a group of
mothers whose children disappeared in
the drug- cartel wars started digging up
mass graves themselves. In Japan, a fa-
ther learned to scuba dive so he could
spend weekends at the bottom of the sea
searching for a daughter he lost in the
March 2011 tsunami.
Murad lives to share his own pain. He
gives talks at ICMP events. He grieves
in public, letting everyone see the raw-
ness of his unfathomable loss, shar-
ing everything he can about his family
even as tears stream down his face, in
the hope that this will jolt people out
of apathy and someone, somewhere,
will help him find Nishtiman, Nashwan
and Nashat. “At least I could go and visit
their graves, and just know that they are
there,” he says.
For Gudmundsson, the search for
the truth ended a few months after the
tsunami. In March 2005, her daughter
Linda’s body was identified. Her DNA
had been retrieved from her dental re-
cords. But Mira was a baby. She did not
have many teeth. She was finally iden-
tified in July 2005 after the ICMP used
its most advanced DNA- analysis tools,
which were able to make a match with
Gudmundsson’s DNA.
“It is the same sadness, of course,
but it is easier to understand,”
Gudmundsson says, adding that her
grieving process was helped by a lack
of blame. “This was nature, it was a
catastrophe; I feel no need for revenge.
But if there is war, terrorism, I think it’s
another sorrow and another sadness. I
only can say if they are waiting for their
relatives to be identified, have hope.
Trust the science.”
But science is only part of the problem.First, the bodies of the Mediterranean
dead need to be found—and no one
knows exactly where they are.at the heIght of the refugee cri-
sis, it was chaos. Bodies washed up on
beaches, and no one knew what to do
with them. Giorgia Mirto, a field re-
searcher on border deaths at the Uni-
versity of Bologna, describes haphaz-
ard record keeping in Italy and the lack
of systematic procedures to take DNA
samples from bodies or bury victims
from the same shipwreck together. After
2013, when two high- profile shipwrecks
prompted more scrutiny, a protocol for
dealing with the recovered bodies was
developed. But Mirto says it’s not clear if
every municipality is following the cor-
rect procedures.World