Danica Weeks’ husband Paul was on flight MH370. How can life go on without him?

DANICA Weeks’ husband Paul was on flight MH370. How can she tell their boys where he’s gone when she has no idea herself?

140906 TWAM EMBARGO FOR TWAM 6 SEP 2014 NO REUSE FEE APPLIES Danica Weeks, photographed with her sons Jack (1 yo) and Lincoln (3 1/2 yp), at home at The Vines, Perth WA pic : Philip Gostelow Picture: Captioned As

DANICA Weeks was ­driving home from daycare with her sons Lincoln and Jack the other day when she stopped to give way to a truck.

Suddenly a little voice piped up from the back seat: “Pull out now, Mummy!” “I can’t do that,” Danica told four-year-old Lincoln, “we might have an accident.” “But Mummy,” Lincoln argued, “if you pull out and we hit that truck, then you and me and Jack can go to heaven to be with Daddy.”

How do you tell a small boy, who last waved his daddy off on a plane to go to work, that daddy will never come home again? Correction: how do you tell a little boy that his daddy ­probably isn’t coming home again… but that, just possibly, he might return? What do you tell your son when he asks where his daddy has gone? Do you tell him Daddy’s in heaven? With the stars? Or at the bottom of the ocean? Or do you say that you can’t tell him where Daddy has gone because you have no idea yourself?

“I tell him that Daddy’s in the stars, and that he’s always with him,” says Danica. “But all Lincoln knows is that Daddy went to work forever. Often, when I’m getting ready for work, he says: ‘Mummy, are you going to work forever too?’ He gets very emotional; he’s always worried I’m going to disappear. And I always tell him no, I’m coming home again. But his daddy never did.”

Danica’s husband Paul was on his way to work, to the job on a Mongolia mine site that would secure his family’s future, when he boarded Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 on March 8 in Kuala Lumpur and, hours later, along with the other 238 passengers and crew, disappeared. And every day since, Danica has taken her own hopeless journey to nowhere.

“It’s 128 days today,” she says, soon after I arrive to meet her in Perth. Every one of those days has been its own journey into a void and today, despite the thousands of man hours and millions of dollars spent searching for the plane, despite the scores of hours she has personally spent going over every detail of the two official reports into the plane’s disappearance, she still has no answers. Not one. Not even the tiniest clue as to where the man who’d been her life for 14 years has disappeared.

“I am stuck on March 8,” says Danica. “My life stopped that day. I saw him walk out that gate at Perth airport. Lincoln screamed, ‘I love you’ and Paul had a smile from ear to ear. Then he was gone. I can’t move on from that.” Then she corrects herself. “Actually, I’m stuck on March 7. When we were still together, still a family unit.”

Danica, 40, and Paul, 39, met 14 years ago at the Munich beer festival. He was from Christchurch, New Zealand, and on a tour around Europe; Danica, from Noosa in Queensland, had been living in London for two years and was on her second visit to the ­Oktoberfest. “We spent all day together; then I went back to London,” she recalls. “A little while later he came to the UK and the minute he landed he came straight to my place. We spent every day together for the next two weeks.”

At the end of that fortnight they moved in together. “It might sound soon, but it made sense to us,” she says. They lived happily together in London until the 9/11 attacks precipitated a decision to move to Christchurch, where Danica supported Paul while he studied for a degree in mechanical engineering.

Lincoln was born on the night in 2010 that Christchurch had its first major earthquake – the 7.1-magnitude jolt that caused much damage but took no lives. “The hospital felt like it was on rollers, and when Lincoln was born Paul just picked him up and stood in the corner with him and he cried.” Then the second, catastrophic quake came five months later and the couple decided to move to Perth, where they had friends and the job prospects were better. The next three years were happy. Paul was working for an international company that distributed gas and diesel engines to mining companies and other facilities, and Danica was an accountant at the State Equestrian Centre. “He was home every night; he’d read the boys their bedtime story,” says Danica. “Even when we were both at work we never went without speaking; he would SMS me eight times a day and sometimes he would bring my lunch to my work and we’d have lunch together. We did everything together; every spare moment we had we had together.”

A year ago, Jack came along and the family was complete. Jack has his mum’s temper but Lincoln, Danica says proudly, is a real daddy’s boy – in Lincoln’s room is a collection of toy cars that Paul put together for him, along with a map of Mongolia with the word “Daddy” written over the area where he would be working.

Neither Danica nor Paul hesitated when the opportunity came, through a contact at Rio Tinto, for Paul to work at the mine in Mongolia on a fly-in, fly-out basis: 28 days on and 14 off. “For those 14 days we would have him home all the time, not going to work, just being with us. We knew we would miss him for 28 days but we were so looking forward to those two weeks when we would have him to ourselves.”

This job would launch Paul into his future, they both felt sure. “We had done our 10 years of hard yakka to get to where we were. This was a stepping stone, the start of an amazing career. We were planners; we had planned our lives. We were going to grow old together and we told each other that when we were old we would live down the road from the boys, whether they liked it or not.

“One night we went to the rugby with some of his clients and one of the men said to me, ‘There are a handful of people you meet in your life who you know are going to go far, and your husband is one of them.’ And he was right. Paul is so intelligent, so determined, so strong. He motivated everyone around him and wanted to make his own mark.”

Their last week as a family was both ordinary and extraordinary. Ordinary because it was filled with the everyday experiences that make family life; extraordinary for the same reason, and because these everyday events are now prefaced with the word “last”.

Wednesday, when Paul took Lincoln to The Vines resort in Perth to play golf. For the last time. Thursday, when he looked after the boys by himself while Danica was at work and she came home to find them all playing music – the boys joyfully banging the drums, Paul playing guitar. “I’ve had the most awesome day with the boys,” he told her, his face splitting in the grin she loved.

Friday, March 7. The last day, spent at The Vines, a weekly ritual since they’d moved to Perth in 2011. Lunch – burgers and chips, with chocolate milkshakes for Lincoln and little Jack, coffee for Paul and Danica. Then the afternoon spent swimming; just a normal, lovely day.

“That’s the life I go back to, the life I don’t have any more,” Danica says. The life of March 7 and all those happy, preceding days. “Every night now I go home and it’s lonely, it’s very lonely. When you’ve had someone there for 14 years, how do you keep going when they’re gone?”

Saturday morning. March 8. Paul took off his watch and his wedding ring and gave them to his wife. “If anything should happen to me,” he said, “The wedding ring should go to the first son that gets married and the watch to the ­second.” Danica shows me the ring, which she wears now on a chain around her neck. “I had been so worried for him, but for all the wrong reasons,” she says. “Paul used to show me what was going on in Mongolia and I worried for his safety there. I was so concerned that something might happen to him on the mining site. I didn’t even think about the plane. Who does? We even joked about a crash. He showed me his business class ticket and said, ‘Now I’ve got business class, the plane will crash.’ It’s just something people say, you never actually believe it.”

Paul certainly didn’t believe it. Earlier that morning he had reassured his mum, who’d been visiting from New Zealand and was nervous about flying home again. “He said, ‘The worst part is the take-off and landing. Once the plane is in the sky it’s very, very unlikely that anything will happen to it.’ Paul’s a mechanical engineer; he isn’t under any illusions, he knows that planes can crash. But the chance that they’ll fall out of the sky is minute. And the chance they’ll just disappear…” She laughs, with absolutely no humour in the laughter. “But that’s exactly what happened to him.”

When he gave her the watch and the ring, Danica told her husband she couldn’t go on if she lost him. “He said, ‘But you won’t have the choice. You will go on because you have to keep me alive, keep my memory alive, for the boys. Because that’s what I would do for you.’

“So that’s what I’m doing,” she says. “Pauly and I used to lie in bed and read the news on our phones. I would read about these awful things happening to other people and I would say, ‘Isn’t this terrible?’ But then you’d go on with life as usual while someone else’s life had been completely destroyed. And now I’m that person, the person whose life has been destroyed and I don’t even know how it happened.

“That’s why I won’t rest until I find out what happened to Pauly. That’s why I won’t let [Malaysia Airlines] treat him like a seat number. I have to keep him alive. And I won’t rest until we find out what happened to him and to everyone else on that plane.”

In the early hours of July 18, Danica posted on Facebook: “OMG! In tears, my heart breaks for the families of flight MH17!! Can’t believe it!! Can’t process it!!! Bless you all, my heart goes out to you x.”

Some 132 days after MH370 disappeared, Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 was shot out of the sky over Ukraine with the loss of all 298 on board, including 38 Australian citizens and ­permanent residents – an impossibly cruel coincidence. Danica knows what the loved ones of the MH17 victims are going through, just as they would understand her grief and bewilderment. The circumstances of the two disasters differ – there is physical proof of the disaster that befell MH17 – but the two events share an air of ­unreality: the sheer impossibility of one plane disappearing without trace, and the other being shot down as it flew over someone else’s war.

One Australian couple found it impossible to accept that their daughter had died in the MH17 crash so they travelled to Ukraine to try to find her. Danica understands why they did it; she is familiar with that sense of hopeless hope, the grasping at phantoms, the grief frozen because there is nothing physical to grieve over. “That is my life,” says Danica. “Every morning I wake up and think, ‘How do you lose a plane?’ I can’t even begin to grieve yet.”

As she speaks about Paul, Danica veers between the present and the past tense. “Paul is a mechanical engineer,” she will say in one breath, and in the next, “He was so intelligent.” I ask her what tense she uses when she thinks about him. “I switch between is and was,” she says. “In the days just after it happened, I expected that Pauly would just come through the door. Sometimes, I still do. You hold on to that hope that he is still there, somewhere, and that hope is always going to be there until they find something concrete. You can’t tell someone to let that go.”

She got close at one point; she almost accepted that Paul must be gone. That was when the searchers thought they’d heard pings from the plane’s two black box flight recorders, when the families were told there was a good chance its final resting place had been found. It was almost a month after MH370 disappeared. The Australian navy ship Ocean Shield picked up four signals – the first two on April 5 and, a few days later, two more signals. They came as the batteries in the flight recorders were due to start expiring; retired Air Chief Marshal Angus Houston, head of the search’s Joint Agency Coordination Centre (JACC), described it as “the most promising lead” in the search so far.

“He told me that, too,” says Danica, who used to go regularly for one-on-one briefings with Houston at RAAF Base Pearce, north of Perth, where the air search for MH370 was coordinated. Houston gave Danica his mobile number and kept her up to date with the search as it continued. “He’s a lovely man,” she says. When the first pings were heard and the search intensified, Houston told her: “Go home and start to prepare,” and she knew what he meant. So Danica went home and began to plan a memorial service for her husband.

“Pauly always wanted to be taken home to Christchurch, and we have lots of friends in New Zealand so that’s where I planned to have it,” she says. “I had found all these photos which I sent to the friends who were helping me organise the memorial and we were really getting close to completing our plans.

“The searchers seemed to be getting so close, too, to finding the black boxes. The guys were so confident they would find it. I thought, ‘At least I’ll know and I’ll be able to say goodbye to Pauly properly.’ At least I’d have an answer. And then one day the pings just stopped.”

On May 29, day 82 of the search, the JACC admitted that MH370 was not, after all, in the area of the Indian Ocean where they’d been searching; that a search of seabed in the area where the signals had been detected had found nothing. Michael Dean, the US Navy’s deputy director of ocean engineering, dealt a further blow to Danica’s hopes, and the hopes of all the ­relatives of the MH370 passengers, when he said: “Our best theory at this point is that [the pings were] likely some sound produced by the ship … or within the electronics of the towed pinger locator.”

“My life stopped again,” says Danica. “I had been holding on to something, anything, that would give me hope that I was going to find out where my husband was. And that had all gone. I rang my friends who were organising the memorial and said, ‘It’s not happening.’ I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t hold a memorial for Pauly without anything concrete.

“When the pings stopped, I became numb. I had to. I’ve been numb ever since. It’s the only way to survive.”

We talk about the vagaries in the search for MH370: the sudden decision to switch the search 1000km north from the original target area in the southern Indian Ocean; the alleged sightings – one over the Maldives, another by a British yachtswoman – that were discounted with no real explanation; the pings; and the 50-page report by the Australian Transport Safety Bureau that took all the theories and ­suppositions back to square one. This was the ghost-flight scenario, in which a catastrophic event occurred that resulted in all passengers and crew becoming unconscious as the plane flew for five hours on autopilot until its two fuel-starved engines cut out and it crashed somewhere in the southern Indian Ocean, where the search has now returned.

I ask Danica if she believes any of the ­conspiracy theories doing the rounds. She pauses for a while before she answers: “Before the pings stopped I would have said, ‘No way’. I was convinced they would find MH370 where they thought it was. But now I think anything is possible. And people can have their conspiracy theories because that’s all we’ve got left. I would obviously hate to think that ­something horrible happened but that’s all we’ve been left with.”

She is full of praise for Houston and for the JACC team, although she is suspicious of the information they were given for the search. She is, however, highly critical of Malaysia Airlines for its lack of transparency in the handling of the crisis – and, in particular, in the way it treated the bereaved families.

Danica was particularly badly treated. The day the plane crashed, she heard of the disaster not from Malaysia Airlines but from a reporter in New Zealand who had apparently received the news before the families did. When the ­airline announced that all hope had gone for the plane and its passengers, the airline care-giver allocated to Danica had inexplicably been left off the email advising family supporters to ­prepare the families, and Danica heard only by an SMS message. “My neighbours could hear me screaming,” she says. And when the news came that the “pings” were probably not from the flight recorders, her care-giver was busy moving office and did not alert her.

Even the airline’s preliminary report into the crash got Paul’s age wrong. “That snapped me,” she says. “He is my world and they can’t even treat him like a person. He’s more than just a seat number.” Recently, Danica sent 12 questions to Malaysia Airlines and she says she will keep asking questions because this is all she has. “I’m not going to disappear,” she says.

As we talk Danica smiles a lot, and even laughs at times. Tears float in her eyes constantly, although she doesn’t let them spill over. “I am getting better,” she insists. “I used to just try to make it from minute to minute, then it was hour to hour and now it’s day to day. I can’t say I have good days and bad days, it’s just bad days and less bad days. Sometimes, when the kids have gone to daycare I could just stop. I could crawl into a corner or under the bed and stay there all day.

“But I have found a strength I never knew I had and it’s Pauly who has given me that strength. I have to keep it together for the boys. I can’t let them see what I’m feeling. I cried once in front of Lincoln and for days he didn’t talk about his dad. I thought he was handling it really well but then my sister said, ‘He talks about his daddy all the time but he doesn’t want to talk about him in front of you in case it upsets you.’ So I need to be in a place where I can talk to Lincoln and Jack openly about their dad and not be in a mess in front of them. It’s such a hard journey.”

There have been some highlights. Paul had started to renovate the kitchen before he left and her friends decided to finish the job, with the help of the team from the Seven Network’s TV show House Rules. “That was a really positive thing to happen,” she says.

And the future? What if she never finds out what happened to Paul, to all those other souls on flight MH370? Danica has given herself a kind of deadline. She will hold out for a year, she says. “But if we still don’t know in a year, I won’t be able to cope,” she says. “I don’t know what I’ll do.”

I remind her that she also said she couldn’t cope if she lost Paul, and she is coping. She gazes at me for a while. “Even if they do find something,” she says, “that’s not the end of it. We’ll have to start all over again. How did it get there? What really happened? If they find something it will only be the beginning. Really, it will start all over again. And so will I.”