Over the past several months, people have generously offered us so many things. Help with Ryan’s story. A platform. Connections. Time.
We are so grateful.
They still want to help, all this time later.
That alone undoes me a little every time.
Some days we move through our lives. Other days we are barely moving at all, weighed down by this feeling that we are failing at everything.
Failing Ryan.
Failing our girls.
Failing each other.
Failing the people who have been so good to us.
Every one of them believes theirs is the only ask we’ve gotten.
It never is.
It is never just one message, one offer, one well-meaning stranger with a theory. It is all of them, every day, stacked on top of each other, and Scott and I are the only two people carrying the weight of all of it at once.
I don’t mind the interviews or the speaking engagements. They give me a platform, a chance to say Ryan’s name out loud and mean something by it. That part is second nature now.
I show up.
I speak.
I advocate.
Cause and effect.
I can see exactly what I did and exactly what it accomplished.
It’s the rest of it that wears us down.
The “please contact me, I want to talk about Ryan.” The offers of private investigative work. The intuitives. The mediums. The people who are certain they have a sign, a feeling or one more piece of the puzzle.
Nothing concrete ever comes from any of it.
But the cost is enormous.
I am asked to relive that night again. To weigh a stranger’s certainty against everything we already know. To find some gentle way to say no without sounding ungrateful for the fact that they cared enough to reach out at all.
I end up defending.
Defending what we know.
Defending what we’ve already tried.
Defending Ryan, in a way, from people who only mean to help him.
Every conversation asks me to reopen a door I will spend the rest of my life trying to close just enough to survive another day.
It bleeds into everything else.
I go quiet on the small, kind messages too. The benign ones that should cost nothing to answer.
I don’t decide to do this. I wish I could tell you it was a boundary I chose.
It isn’t.
It’s an exhaustion that doesn’t show up anywhere on the outside. Some days I am unmoved to do anything at all, even the easy, loving things.
I hate that about myself.
I want to respond to every single post on Ryan’s page. I see them all. But sometimes even a comment costs more than I have that day.
There is a name for what we live with.
Ambiguous loss.
In a normal loss, you grieve and eventually land somewhere.
We don’t.
We hope. We also try to make peace with what has surely happened by now.
Both live in us every day.
Neither one wins.
Even wobbling toward the harder truth costs something.
When I let myself lean there, just to survive a moment, people notice. They tell us we should still have hope, as if accepting the worst is a failure of faith rather than a place I sometimes need to stand just to keep breathing.
And God, I want to believe the other version.
I want Ryan to walk through a door somewhere, someday.
But the second I let myself believe it, another thought follows right behind it.
What did all that time away do to him?
Where has he been?
What has he survived, if he survived anything at all?
I don’t want my son gone from this earth.
I also don’t want to know that he suffered every day he was away from it.
There is no version of this I can make peace with.
It haunts me.
It keeps me from becoming the person I think I would have been.
I have spent most of my life trying not to disappoint people. I will apologize for taking up space I am entitled to. I will say yes when my whole body is screaming no.
I used to think this was a woman’s problem. I have never once read an article about men struggling with this.
But I watch Scott do the exact same dance.
Quieter.
Alone.
In his own corner of it.
Maybe nobody writes about it because nobody thinks to ask him.
The hardest part isn’t disappointing strangers.
It’s disappointing the people who have never asked anything from us.
Our friends.
The ones who showed up at Sun Peaks, who organized searches, who sat with us in the worst of it and never once made it about themselves.
They don’t make requests.
They don’t need anything from us.
And still, some days, we can’t show up for them either.
Not because of anything they’ve done.
That is its own kind of awful.
To know exactly how much someone deserves from you, and to know you can’t give it to them that day.
It isn’t one interview.
Or one message.
Or one difficult conversation.
It’s all of them.
Day after day.
Until one ordinary Tuesday asks for more than we have left.
We circle the wagons then.
Not because we want to shut people out.
Because sometimes it’s the only way to protect what’s left of us.
So sometimes we don’t answer.
And then the guilt starts.
We think you’ll believe we don’t care.
We think you’ll believe your kindness meant nothing to us.
It meant everything.
We just didn’t have it in us that day to say so.
If you’ve reached out and we’ve been slow, quiet, or didn’t say it right, it was never about you.
It was about a Tuesday that took everything we had just to get through.
The people who help us most aren’t always the ones trying to solve Ryan’s disappearance.
They’re the ones who quietly understand that some days we won’t answer. The ones who don’t take our silence personally. The ones who keep showing up anyway.
That kind of grace carries us farther than they’ll ever know.
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