What it’s like to be the parent of a missing person

By Larissa Waterson| 3 years ago Honey

 

The disappearance of Anthony Fahey

Another Aussie parent who hopes that, one day, she’ll look out through her kitchen window and see her son walking down the driveway, is Eileen Fahey.

Eileen’s son Anthony Fahey disappeared from their family home in Murrumbateman, near the ACT border, on Wednesday July 3, 2013. He was 29.

“It’s not knowing that’s really, really difficult,” she says in an interview on the TODAY Show.

“Every day I look out my kitchen window which has a view of the driveway and I just expect him to come walking down.”

Anthony, or ‘Tony’ as his mum calls him, had returned home to Murrumbateman after moving to Perth to live with his girlfriend proved “too much” for him.

“He was very much into conspiracy theories, he was unsettled and I think struggled to find his place in society,” Eileen says.

Voicing a need to “clear his head”, Tony asked to be dropped at a local bus stop where he said he was going to “catch a bus to either Sydney or Melbourne, whichever bus comes first.”

Tony bought a ticket for a 7pm Sydney-bound bus and has never been seen since.

“In my heart, I initially thought, ‘He’s gone away, he needed to clear his head, surely he’ll be home for Christmas, he loves Christmas.’”

“I never, ever thought that I would be in this situation."

Grieving 

Eileen says, unlike the death of a loved one, when someone goes missing, the cycle of grief is endless.

“With a normal cycle of grief -- you go through it and you come to some sort of resolution. With ambiguous loss (when you lose something without closure), you don’t come to a resolution -- you get so far in that grief cycle and then it starts all over again.,” she says .

While she still hopes that one day Tony will show up at her front door, Eileen says she has other members of her family, including six other children and three grandchildren who need her.

“We have a lovely dam on our property and on Anthony’s birthday, on the anniversary of his disappearance, and through Missing Persons Week (August 5 – 11), I go and sit at the dam, I have a little luxury of a cry, and then I pull myself together and say ‘Okay, now I need to be there for the rest of my family’”.

For anyone who fears their loved one has gone missing, Eileen urges them to “act quickly”.

“I think the most important thing is to act quickly. A lot of people sit back and think ‘I don’t want to jump on this too early’, ‘They’ll come home tomorrow and they’ll think I’ve overreacted’”.

In Australia, contrary to social myth, there is no time limit on reporting a missing person -- if you are concerned about someone’s disappearance, people are urged to contact police.

“You need to call the police really quickly and you need to start tracking the person’s movements,” Eileen says.

“Use social media and whatever else to create awareness.”

Missing persons week: family struggling to move house in hope of son returning home

By Elise Scott and Jordan Hayne

One year after Eileen Fahey's son Tony disappeared, she shared a message for him: her door would always be open.

But now, half a decade after he was last seen, she's considering the prospect of leaving behind the home they shared, and the memories its walls hold.

"It's a fairly big house and we're looking to downsize," she says.

"Anthony knows where we are. He knows we're here.

Eileen hasn't seen her son since July 2013.

All she knows is he left their home in Murrumbateman, and was dropped off at a bus stop in Belconnen by his aunt.

Police were able to determine he headed for Sydney, after telling family he needed to get out of town and clear his head.

But in the five years since there's been no trace of Tony. His bank accounts, email and social media haven't been accessed.

"My biggest fear is if I move from here, will I lose those memories?" she says.

"I can still see him sitting at the end of the bench: 'Hey Mum, what about this' and 'hey Mum, what about that?'

"Anthony might come walking down that driveway any day, any moment.

"I'd be devastated if he came here and we weren't here."

Families hold on for years

The daily anxiety and anguish for Eileen and her family is being highlighted by the Australian Federal Police as part of missing persons week.

The usual stress and emotional strain of selling a home is amplified by the ever-present uncertainty of whether Tony might come home.

There are 2,600 long-term missing people listed on the AFP's missing persons register — and police say many of them have left families stuck in limbo, unable to find closure.

"It's very difficult to explain what these families go through," Trish Halligan from the AFP's National Missing Persons Co-ordination Centre said.

"These people suffer year in, year out.

"They find it very difficult to part with possessions, with their homes … It's what to connects them to this loved one that's missing."

Still waiting

For the Faheys, family Christmas gatherings are particularly hard.

While once she would watch as Tony played darts and poker with his six brothers and sisters, Elieen's gaze is now fixed outside.

"I really thought that he would come home for Christmas. There's no way that he would miss out, with all that family excitement," she says.

Facing the prospect of selling, Eileen says she would rather see the home go to somebody within the family, so they can greet Tony if he ever comes back.

In the intervening years grandparents have died and siblings married, but Eileen retains hope Tony will one day return home.

"Whenever there's a crowd I'm always looking to see if I can see his face," she says.

"To me it was always he was just going to get his head together and come home. We're still waiting.

"Still waiting."

Five years ago, Eileen's son boarded a bus to Sydney. He hasn't been seen since.

AUGUST 11, 2018

They call it ambiguous loss. Grief that occurs without the closure of a death, leaving a person in a perpetual state of not knowing.

It’s a heartache NSW mother Eileen Fahey lives with everyday.

Her son, Anthony (Tony to most), has been missing for more than five years; no calls home, no emails, no money spent from his account, or flights taken. Lost. Like more than 2600 other Australians currently on the long-term missing persons register.

“When you bear children, part of your life blood or life spirit, whatever you want to call it, part of you is in your children. And when one of them is missing and you can’t reconcile why, it’s very, very hard,” the mother of seven told Mamamia.

“I have nothing to say that he’s not here anymore. So until I can come to that, then I need to cling onto hope that he is still alive. I’ll just have to wait.”

Tony was 29 when he disappeared on Wednesday July 3, 2013.

He’d been working in construction, but was unemployed at the time, and had recently moved back into his parents’ home in Murrumbateman, near the ACT border. The previous month he’d been living in Perth with his girlfriend, but according to Eileen, the move to WA proved “too much” for him, “a strain”.

“He told [his girlfriend] that he needed to go home and sort himself out before he could actually stay and be with her,” she said. “So he was a bit unsettled.”

During a 2017 coronial inquest into his disappearance, Tony’s aunt, Margaret Harries, gave evidence that when he visited her Canberra home the day he vanished, he “seemed depressed, preoccupied, and wanted answers to things”, namely religion and politics. That afternoon he told her, “I’m going to go to the Jolimont Centre [Canberra’s main bus terminal] and catch a bus to either Sydney or Melbourne, whichever bus comes first.”

Before he left, Margaret gave him a plastic bag filled with a cup of two-minute noodles, a pair of socks, boxers and long pants, and urged him to stay safe and to call.

Tony bought a ticket for a 7:00pm Sydney-bound bus, and the passenger manifest shows his name was marked off. That is the last known trace of him.

In those early weeks and months, Eileen fought off the negative thoughts that ran through her head each night as she tried to sleep; she told herself that Tony was just clearing his head, that he would return at Christmas - his favourite time of year.

He'd be back to help with the ham and turkey, to tuck into pudding, to play poker and darts with his four brothers until the early hours of the morning.

But he didn't show.

"From the island bench in our kitchen I can look out the window and I can see the driveway. Every Christmas standing at that bench, I've looked out, expecting that I will see him walk down that driveway," she said. "And I'm always shocked when he doesn't."

That expectation is part of the reason she and her husband are reluctant to move house. Though they plan to retire in the coming years and hope to downsize from their five-acre property, they're worried.

"How can I leave? The memories of the last 15 years are in this house. I guess I'm frightened about I may lose those," she said. "And what happens if Anthony comes home and there are strangers there? Those things really play heavily on my mind."

There have been several sightings reported in past five years - all false. Each time Eileen and her husband have steeled themselves, as they've been handed CCTV footage and photographs of men resembling their son.

"You're trying not to build up too much hope. And as a matter of fact, we're probably more critical, rather than positive we when we see or hear something, because we are protecting ourselves," she said.

"You could drive yourself mad."

Perhaps the most difficult was when police took DNA from them after a torso matching Tony's build was found in Queensland in 2013. For 12 weeks they waited, until the negative result came through.

"I still believe there's hope that he could come home."

Almost as bad as the 'not knowing', Eileen said, is the feeling of helplessness. She does her best to ease it by speaking publicly about Tony, by following up with police, by answering every phone call, by searching.

Almost reflexively, she scans the faces of construction workers, the homeless, even the people walking behind reporters on the nightly news. She has trawled social media and the internet for clues, and even took a year off work to dedicate herself to looking for her boy.

"A lot of people [with a missing loved one] feel guilty that they may not have done enough," she said. "I don't want to find in 10 or 15 years that I turn around and think that. I'd much rather be very active now."

Yet as time passes and the leads dwindle, the threads of what happened to Tony become more difficult to pick up.

"I have noticed that in the very early days of talking and sharing about Anthony I would say, 'when he comes home', then about six months ago I started saying 'if'," Eileen said. "I don't know why. That's obviously some sort of emotional thing inside... I don't know.

"I still believe there's hope that he could come home. But you know, as the years go on that hope is much harder to keep going. I'm still out there, and I'm determined with my head and I am absolutely determined in my heart that I will keep going and I will keep searching and I will keep looking," she said.

"I'm not that naive that I don't think I may at some point need to accept that is dead, or maybe he just doesn't want to come home. So there are other reasons, and I just need to be open to any of them. But whatever happens, the most important thing for me is just to know."

Every now and then Eileen takes a moment, alone, to feel the weight of it all.

"We have a little dam on our property, and I sit there and have a little luxurious cry, for want of a better term. But then I sort of say to myself, 'Well OK. Now I need to pick myself up,'" she said. "I've got six other children, I've got a loving husband and three grandchildren; I need to be the best person I can be for them. So that helps me. That helps me to keep going."

To her son, should he see or hear her message, or learn of her tireless search, "I would tell him that I love him very much, I miss him terribly. And to contact someone in the family. That's all we need. We just need to know he's OK."

If you think you may have seen Tony or have any information about his disappearance, please call Crime Stoppers on 1800 333 000. Any small piece of information could help.

For information about other missing persons, please visit the Australian Federal Police website.

'I live in fear of losing my phone': Mum of missing man lives in hope of one phone call

The mother of a man who went missing five years ago has told of how her life has been left on pause since the day her son disappeared, afraid to change her phone number or move house in case he tries to contact his family.

Anthony Fahey was 29 when he boarded a bus from Canberra to Sydney on July 3, 2013, and hasn’t been heard from since.

His mother Eileen Fahey thinks about her son every day, constantly wondering where he is and if he is okay.

“I live in fear of losing my mobile number, because I know Anthony knows that number,” Mrs Fahey told Yahoo7.

“We’re looking at moving, but how do we move away from a house where we have 15 years of memories of him?

“My fear is, if I leave that house will I lose that memory? I’ll not be able to hear his voice anymore.”

‘Unusual’ disappearance

Tony, who would now be 34, boarded the bus to ‘get away’ for a few days, but his bank account, credit cards, Medicare card and social media accounts have not been used since he left.

“When Anthony first went missing, because he was 29 – a grown man, for the first two or three days I didn’t really think anything of it,” Mrs Fahey said.

“By the third day I thought, ‘this is unusual’.”

Mrs Fahey, her husband and Tony’s six siblings travelled to Sydney to look for him; searching the city’s streets and homeless shelters to no avail.

“It’s unfathomable, you don’t ever expect to be in this situation,” she said.

‘I was so sure he would walk down the driveway’

Tony, who worked in construction, was the third youngest of his siblings and loved Christmas time with his family. In 2013, the year he went missing, his mother was certain he would return home on Christmas Eve.

“We’ve missed him, a lot has happened in our family in five years. His grandfather has passed away. His brother has gotten married and there are two nephews he hasn’t met. And Christmases – Christmas is very special in our house.

“I was just so sure that he would walk down the driveway on Christmas Eve. I could’ve staked my life on it and I was just so shocked when he didn’t.”

Mrs Fahey said she tries to maintain her positivity and faith – made easier by her “wonderful, supportive” husband – but found herself and her family stuck in a constant cycle of grief.

“The thing that’s most difficult is that we just don’t know. I don’t know if he’s alive or if he’s dead, I don’t know if he needs us or if he’s in trouble, I just don’t know.

“There’s just a cycle of grief that you go through. There’s no resolution and it just starts all over again. It just doesn’t get any better.”

The family have been shattered by several false sightings of Tony, who stands at six-feet-tall, with brown hair, brown eyes and a beard.

But Mrs Fahey is grateful people are looking for her boy.

“I just take my hat off to those people, I’m just so thankful. It lets me know that I’m not the only one looking.”

‘I’ll never give up’

This week – August 5 to 11 – is National Missing Persons Week. This year marks the 30th anniversary of the event.

For Mrs Fahey, the week is one of the hardest times of the year, along with her son’s birthday and the anniversary of his disappearance.

But she willingly takes every opportunity to speak about her son, in the hopes that his story will reach the right person.

“From a mother of a long-term missing person, I would dearly love the community to be my eyes and ears, to help me find him. I just need to find out if he’s okay. I need to find out what’s happened.

“I’m not going to tell him off, I’m going to welcome him with open arms. Just come home, just call.”

“I’ll never give up until I know.”

To mark the event’s 30^th year, the AFP is profiling 30 long-term missing people from around the country on their Missing Persons Facebook page.

AFP Deputy Commissioner Neil Gaughan said he hoped this year’s campaign would give an insight into the critical role the public can play.

“It’s important that we raise awareness of this issue, including the reasons why people go missing, the social and financial impacts, and how the community can get involved.

“This might mean taking an interest and sharing our social media posts. After all, the community is our eyes and ears in these cases, helping police find the many thousands of people who go missing each year.”