ON March 8, 2014, Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 took off from KLIA heading for Beijing, bearing a crew of 12 serving 227 passengers from 15 nations.

At 1.19am, ground control received the last voice-call from the flight. Three minutes later, the plane disappeared from civilian radar screens and into aviation mystery.

Malaysian military radar tracked the plane till 370km northwest of Penang in the Andaman Sea. The futile scouring of the Indian Ocean floorbed has prompted a suspension of the search until the data is re-analysed, though bits of the plane have beached on African shores.

That much is known. The rest is unanswered, made murkier by the many conspiracy theories that sprouted in its missing wake. Not to mention a crass, despicable Bollywood film that claimed to tell the story of the ill-fated flight, the trailer suggesting that it had something to do with a steward and stewardess making out in the galley.

Two hundred and thirty-nine people vanished, not just into the night, but also from the lives of and bonds with thousands of family members and friends.

The lives of the immediate families of the missing 239 is a story of emotions – exceptional, extreme emotions. In the first few hours, days, preparing for the worst, yet still hopeful of a happy resolution because, perversely ironic, the inability to say what had happened to the plane and where it was also meant that there was a lifeline of a chance, no matter how slight, that the Boeing 777 with surviving passengers could be located.

And they had to cope, not just with their own troubled emotions, but also that of their children.

Since that momentous day, the emotions have endured, while an elephant haunts the house, squatting in the middle of the living room, its musk possibly faintly remaining in clothes and footwear kept for a miraculous return, looming large at family gatherings.

What follows is the emotional arc of three spouses of crew members of MH370 – Jacquita Gomes, wife of the in-flight supervisor, Patrick Gomes; Calvin Shim, husband of chief stewardess, Christine Tan; and Lee Khim Fatt, husband of stewardess Christine Loong.

When did the bolt of bad tidings come out of the blue and carve the irreparably painful divide between Before and After March 8, 2014?

Lee got the first word from his sister-in-law in Taiwan, who had seen it in Facebook. The one thing that still rankles in Lee was the several silent hours after the plane was lost before families were informed, the offence of the omission compounded when they had to hear it from friends an hour or more before MAS called.

Jacqui mitigates that charge by noting that MAS probably didn’t have a SOP for such a situation and concedes that the families, too, had no SOP to deal with a situation like MH370’s.

Shim was doing chores about 8.30am, hanging the washing in the backyard. He got news of the missing flight from one of his app chat groups.

Initially, he didn’t register its significance, “because I don’t know how many flights there are to Beijing. There could be many. Though my heart was a bit troubled. I went to check my wife’s roster, and it was hers. Then I just… my mind went blank.”

Jacqui got the news from the grandmother of one of her students, who had been watching the news on CNN. Her first thoughts were: “I didn’t get any call from MAS, so it must be okay.”

Following the call, Jacqui called one of her husband’s friends, a pilot. Told the flight number of the missing plane, she did not recognise it. Jacqui said she didn’t pay attention to the changing flight numbers, just where he was headed to, when he’d back, so that commands could be issued: “Quick, daddy’s coming home. Clean up the house.” 

The two part-time househusbands shamelessly confessed it was their routine at home, too, before their wives returned and complained about the mess greeting them.

And being at school, Jacqui had to call home to wake up a daughter to check the roster stuck on the fridge.

“I was already panicking,” she said, but needed to hide the panic because the children were present. “But when my daughter said MH370, I shouted.”

After telling parents to take their children home and just as she was to leave for home where the family were gathering, Jacqui got a call from MAS.

Jacqui said: “They asked, can we come and see you. I was panicking, in shock, so I asked, ‘Why do you want to see me? Why do you want to come to my house? What is the reason?’ They didn’t give any reason, just said they wanted to come to the house.”

Jacqui met the MAS representatives and was driven to the airport. The families were offered comforting reassurances by many – don’t worry, the plane would be found soon, its fate determined.

Then it was draggy days in a hotel, with nothing to do except attend the daily briefings, where no new information was forthcoming. Many questions were asked, but the authorities were as clueless as the family members.

“One minute say the plane is here, next minute say there, but they didn’t know, and didn’t know how to handle the situation. To make matters worse, they often had their feet in their mouths,” she said.

The people with feet in their mouths were spokesmen of the government and airline. They may have been well-meaning in their messages of hope and comfort, but to people marooned in stressful limbo, normally innocuous words took on a derisory quality.

Words like “baffled” and “unprecedented” used to explain the mystery and the lack of results in the multinational search-and-rescue efforts just added to the frustration and growing despairing conviction that nobody knew anything.

“This military guy said he was baffled. I am baffled, too, that’s why I was asking questions,” said Jacqui.

Struggling to cope with the sudden and unexplained absence of her husband, Jacqui was in no mood to welcome new members of an expanded family, her visceral response being, “I don’t know you from Adam. Why are you suddenly a member of my family?”

Shim reacted differently, initially, to MAS staff declarations of familial ties and a sharing of grief and loss.

“I took their statements about family and help seriously. For the first couple of days, I dared not go for the briefings, I was very scared. But when I went for my first briefing, I took what they said about help seriously. I asked the CEO of MAS (Ahmad Jauhari Yahya) for his personal contact number. He said his secretary would pass it to me. When I didn’t hear from the secretary, I called his office, but couldn’t get through to him. Then I gave up. The D-G of the DCA (Department of Civil Aviation), Datuk Azharuddin gave me his handphone number and I communicated with him. But the CEO of MAS…

“The caregivers from MAS were the closest to the family members, and all they could do was ‘get us this, get us that’, ask what else they could do. What else could they do? Nothing.”

To compound the helplessness, Lee remembers an assemblyman who offered the assurance that the plane would be found after Hari Raya.

“Either you can confirm it, or you shouldn’t just simply talk to offer consolation,” said Lee.

After three days of staying in a hotel, “not being able to do anything, not knowing what’s going on, the briefings being useless”, Jacqui was going stir-crazy and decided to go home.

She doesn’t understand how other families could stand a month’s confinement in the hotel, with no concrete facts to drive away endless thoughts floundering in what-ifs and maybes.

After a week or so, she told her daughters there was no point moping in the house, go back to work. The emotional impact at home was worse, because all Jacqui did was get up in the morning and watch the TV which was already switched on, because every night, she crashed out on the sofa while switching channels, hoping for a break in the search for the plane.

Lee didn’t want to sleep. Every night it was a restless trawling of the internet looking for something new, anything hopeful.

They were clinging on to a hope of good news because in the early days and weeks, efforts to find the plane were described as a “search-and-rescue” mission in the daily briefings. Then it became a “search-and-recovery” mission, and finally, the concession that all efforts had been unfruitful.

Now the only hope they have for closure is the declaration from the authorities that the suspension of the search would allow data to be re-analysed by other technical specialists.

Lee bases his hope on this because a vast area in the Indian Ocean was searched to no avail, and the focus shifted elsewhere.

That shift suggests to Lee that if calculations can be off once, maybe the aviation agencies could have been wrong again, maybe universities and other bodies, approaching the data with fresh, unclouded minds, can find an error in the previous calculations.

Was there ever a day when the demands of daily routine allowed them to forget for a moment or two the absent loved one?

Not a single day has gone by, Jacqui insisted, without her thinking about her husband. There are just too many daily reminders that can trigger off an emotional squall.

For instance, grandson Raphael has learned to whistle. The whistling reminds Jacqui that Patrick never mastered the skill. When he first cast eyes on a 12-year-old Jacqui in Singapore, he couldn’t purse his lips to express his appreciation of her beauty, his shyness prompting him to hide and get his brother to whistle on his behalf.

Only on their marriage 10 years later, did Patrick confess the ruse.

Every year Chap Goh Meh, with its tradition of singles throwing oranges into ponds and sea to wish for a marital partner, would remind her of Patrick’s joke that he had to throw watermelons because her love was not easily won over.

“Or in my car… I will start talking with him. ‘You know, Patrick, today Raphael did… and it always ends with: if only you were here to see it’.”

If only… there were closure, the cliff-hanging stories and lives had a full stop. But in the absence of cathartic, purging grief, all Jacqui, Shim, Lee, and the other affected families can do is traverse an emotional minefield daily and endure, hang on. – April 4, 2017.