How do families of missing people cope with the uncertainty?

Charlie Shunick's sister, Mickey Shunick, was kidnapped in 2012 in Lafayette, Louisiana. Words go only so far to convey the impact of that sort of trauma, she says.

"I can't think of a more torturous, horrific experience to have as a human being," she says.

It's often referred to as "ambiguous loss," a term for the painful process of losing someone without closure. The therapist who coined the term, Pauline Boss, has said it denotes "a situation that's beyond human expectation."

When a loved one goes missing, the sense of loss and uncertainty can overwhelm people left behind, turning the most routine tasks into an ordeal.

"They feel like they can't eat because their child may not be eating. They can't sleep because their child may not be sleeping," says Michelle Jeanis, an associate professor at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette whose research focuses on missing persons.

Families must perform a debilitating balancing act: managing their own lives and trying to find their son or their sister or their mother or their father. All the while, they also juggle hope and doubt over whether their loved one will ever come home.

In the end, Shunick's sister never came home: She was eventually found, murdered.

But until that tragic discovery — and for others whose cases have no resolution — the sense of loss builds over time, says Shunick, who is now a missing persons advocate.

Shunick says similar dynamics are now playing out in the case of Nancy Guthrie, the 84-year-old mother of Today show co-host Savannah Guthrie, who was last seen on Jan. 31.

"They're going through the same exact things that all these lower-profile family members are," Shunick says of the Guthrie family. "It's the same. It's horrible."

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"Nobody's prepared for this"

"Having to mourn without confirmation of whether your loved one is still alive is haunting," says therapist Emely Rumble, a licensed independent clinical social worker who has handled cases involving missing adolescents.

"You don't want to stop having hope and you don't want to stop searching for your loved one," Rumble says. And if conclusive information doesn't emerge, "it just leaves folks in a state of mental and emotional arrest."

Jeanis, of the University of Louisiana, says it's common for families to feel pressure to do the right things as quickly as possible — if they can figure out what those things are.

"Nobody's prepared for this," Jeanis says. "There's no handbook on what to do as a family."

When people contact Shunick for advice, she shares three tips that she calls "the trifecta of a successful campaign."

The goal is to "increase community engagement, communicate with law enforcement and get media attention, because all three of those things feed into each other," she says.

And while some families might not want to talk to the media, it's generally a good idea, according to Jeanis.

"The research tells us, [the] more eyes on that case, the more likely you are to bring that person home," she says.

Grassroots networks fill gaps for families

But not every family receives the same exposure for its case: The phenomenon of the media's "missing white woman" fixation is well-documented, for instance. And while Jeanis and Shunick say organizations such as the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children and the Black and Missing Foundation offer valuable help, many relatives of missing adults must turn to grassroots networks for guidance.

Shunick says she has been in touch with thousands of families; some of the cases she's currently helping with date back more than 25 years.

"We train them on how it works with dog teams and with search and rescue," she says. "We do a lot of PR stuff, we do a lot of fundraisers and we give family members ideas about how to keep their loved one in the spotlight" on platforms such as YouTube and TikTok.

Giving families such tasks accomplishes two goals, she adds: helping the outreach effort and allowing them a rare sense of control.

Key details about Nancy Guthrie's case set it apart: her age (abductions of people in their 80s are rare) and purported ransom demands, as NPR has reported. But Shunick says that no matter who the missing person is, the families' experiences are similar.

"Essentially, you're panicking, especially when you have no idea what might have happened or what caused them to be missing," she says.

"Your imagination is truly your worst enemy," Shunick adds, saying that people tend to envision their loved one facing terrifying ordeals.

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"When I try to explain what it's like to be the family of someone who has been missing for a long time, I talk about it like the monster that you can't see," Jeanis says. "The monster in your head is scarier than the monster you see on TV."

Coping with a long-term disappearance

More than 500,000 people were reported missing in the U.S. last year, according to the Justice Department. Many of those cases are resolved within days, but others linger for months or years. And the sooner someone is found, the more likely it is that they're alive.

In those first weeks, adrenaline and anxiety fuel relatives. But they can't dedicate every moment to a prolonged crisis. And when a disappearance surpasses three months, it's usually considered a long-term case.

"People do have to go back to work. They have to sleep. They have to start eating well and trying to exercise," Shunick says. But, she adds, "there's a guilt that you feel when you deal with any normalcy while your loved one is missing."

Rumble, the therapist, says it's important for families to find ways to live alongside their uncertainty.

For example, creating rituals. Rumble suggests practices such as "lighting a candle weekly, keeping a journal addressed to the missing loved one, setting aside maybe even a remembrance space in the home that allows grief expression, without requiring finality."

It's also important to acknowledge that it's normal to have fluctuating emotions and that grief is not a linear process, Rumble says. A helpful goal for relatives of missing persons, she says, is to hold two thoughts at the same time: "I hope they're alive, and I'm preparing myself for the possibility that they're not."

Rumble often shares book recommendations to help people cope with grief. For missing person cases, she suggests fiction such as What Happened to Ruthy Ramirez by Claire Jiménez and nonfiction such as The Wild Edge of Sorrow by Francis Weller.

Families also face financial stress

Mounting a campaign to find a loved one requires resources, from the time it takes to manage social media outreach to setting up a phone line for tips and holding events to spread awareness. Shunick says that in the nearly three months her sister was missing, her family likely spent around $50,000 trying to find her.

Some expenses overlap with traditional investigative work: Shunick recalls that a couple of hours of work by a canine team cost $10,000, while use of a helicopter to search a remote area cost another $10,000 to $15,000.

In the Guthrie case, police have said DNA evidence, along with the emerging field known as forensic investigative genetic genealogy, could help determine what happened to the 84-year-old grandmother. But that work tends to be very expensive.

"Sometimes police have funding for that, but often they just don't," she says, and families must raise thousands of dollars to cover the costs.

If a disappearance lasts more than a year and police have no leads to pursue, it's usually deemed a cold case, and active police work stops.

Hoping for a resolution — of any kind

In the first days of a disappearance, families are thrust into a frenzy to bring their loved one home safely. And it's common to want to hold someone accountable for a disappearance. But over months and years, those priorities can shift.

"When I talk to the families, they say that they would rather visit a grave than have their person remain missing" and potentially suffering, says Jeanis, the criminology professor.

As for punishing a kidnapper, most families will agree to some kind of deal in exchange for the location of their loved one's remains, she says. "So if there's an offender and we're talking reduced sentence, most families say, 'Well, we want the body more than anything else.'"

Shunick says she came to embrace that sentiment as well.

"At first I was angry because I was like, 'I'd rather her be missing than dead,'" she says. "But now I'm great. We got so lucky, as crazy as that sounds. Because if we never found Mickey, I would still be looking for her in Lafayette. You know, my life would have halted right there."

Instead, she tries to help other families work through a painful process.

"Obviously, I would trade all of this to get my sister back, no question," Shunick says. "But in some ways, the network that I've become part of and the community that I've been able to create has been extremely fulfilling."

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