However, it will not be easy to attain them. Juno starts off at a small village, then travels across a bridge to a chamber where she must offer the scrolls of Jealousy, Control, Rage, and Rebirth to their respective statues. But how I wish the wonderful days outnumbered the other ones."Four beasts rampaged across the earth, Control, jealousy, rage and rebirth, For ten days, they raged against their glided cage, And for ten nights He fought against our people's plight, The earth shook and our oceans burned, as He fought for weeks, his back unturned, He overcame these creatures, escaped unhurt, and sealed these monsters, all around our earth, And so you, who comes from Him, our people's future, decided by your whims." It’s a wonderful day, for the Smith family and those who found her. “FINAL EDIT – HOME WITH HER FAMILY,” it read. Today, Ellie Smith updated a Facebook post about her missing daughter. Even though today’s news story brought good news and a heart-warming ending, it has brought home just how pervasive the stories without a happy ending are, and how inured we might be to them. To call the abduction of a child every parent’s worst nightmare is a glib and overworked cliché. Does it offer them hope? Does it pull open the wound anew? Do they wonder what that relief must be like? I can’t help but think of the bittersweet feeling that the families of other missing children might experience when they read an uplifting story like Cleo’s. The white-hot anguish their parents must have felt down the years. It’s almost impossible not to think of the children who were never found. I can’t imagine the emotional wringing Cleo Smith’s parents have experienced: a washing machine of despair, hope, grief, elation, relief? It doesn’t bear thinking about.Īnd yet they are the lucky ones. A detective telling a little child that they will see their mummy and daddy is all too rare. All too often, these stories don’t end well. We have seen parents, wild-eyed with confusion and grief and fear, or stoic in the headlights of an intense media circus. We have been here so many, many times before, haven’t we? Looking sadly at an image of a carefree and innocent young child, with little idea of the violence or tragedy yet to befall them. I cried at how often we see these stories in the press. I cried at how hardened I have become to newspaper stories about violence against children, and how we simply, sadly expect them to invariably end in tragedy.
I cried at how surprised I was to see Cleo Smith’s smiling face this morning.
More than anything, I cried for the families to whom something similar has happened, but never got their happy ending. I wept for the hard road ahead for Cleo and her family as they no doubt deal with the psychological fallout of this abduction. I wept for what she might have endured in the two weeks since she was taken, sleeping next to her parents in a tent on a camping holiday. Looking at the images of Cleo Smith, waving from her hospital bed after her two-week ordeal with her mother’s hand resting on her leg, I wept. But these images amount to something all too rare in our world: a happy outcome.