MH370 nightmare goes on for mum left behind
Every so often, to escape from the relentless 24/7 hell she has been living in for six months, Danica Weeks pretends her husband Paul is away in Mongolia for work.
"Just for half an hour, just to stop my brain thinking 'where is he, what happened, am I going to be able to bring him home'," she told _The Weekend West _ this week.
"It sounds crazy, but it's the only way I can escape."
Mongolia is where the New Zealand-born mechanical engineer should be, working in a fly-in, fly-out job to provide a better future for his wife and two young boys in Perth.
Instead, Mrs Weeks remains trapped in what she describes as one, long nightmare as the painstaking search for Flight MH370 continues on the ocean floor, 1800km west of Perth.
In the six months since the Malaysia Airlines flight vanished en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing with 227 passengers, milestones for the Weeks family have come and gone.
Baby Jack turned one four months ago, his big brother Lachlan turned four this week and tomorrow, the Father's Day cards the boys have made for their dad will go unread.
Lachlan has stopped asking when his father is coming home and instead tells stories about things they did together before he went away.
"It totally breaks my heart. I'm not coping with what they've lost," Mrs Weeks said.
"Every day gets harder and the milestones are overwhelming. As time goes on, not knowing where he is or what's happened to him, it eats away at your strength."
The MH17 tragedy in July took its toll on Mrs Weeks, who said she has since made contact with a New Zealand woman with two sons who lost her husband in that attack.
This all-consuming heartache and her frustration over what she describes as a lack of transparency in the search process prompted Mrs Weeks to quit her accounting job to focus on her children and the search.
For months she has been knocking on doors and making countless phone calls to the airline and authorities in Australia and Malaysia.
Last week, after hearing a delegation from the airline and the Malaysian Government was coming to Perth, she pursued their representatives until she secured a meeting with them.
"I said, 'It's simple, we just want to know what's going on - we want an update on what's happening behind the scenes'," she said.
"The fact they met with me was a step towards transparency. What I got from them is they hadn't really met with any of the next of kin before, just their representatives from the consulates."
Mrs Weeks is in regular contact with Transport Minister Warren Truss and retired Air Chief Marshall Angus Houston, who heads Australia's Joint Agency Co-ordination Centre.
Air Chief Marshall Houston told Mrs Weeks to make memorial plans when "pings" - thought to have come from the plane's black box - were detected in April.
But she was dealt a devastating blow when it was revealed they came from another source.
Now she is pinning her hopes on the 12-month deep-sea search which is set to begin in three weeks.
"I'm constantly in the background trying to get answers," she said. "I have to hope they will find something there.
"Never finding it is too hard for me to comprehend.
"I know now it's going to be longer than we expected. We haven't had a memorial, we haven't had any closure - that's when it is going to hit me."
Her dogged pursuit of the Malaysian authorities for regular updates and transparency is to honour her husband, Mrs Weeks said.
"I owe it to him to find out what happened and where he is, and to bring him home in whatever form that is," she said.
"And I owe it to our kids, so they know that Mum did everything in her power to bring Dad home and give him the dignity that he is so owed because he's amazing and he did everything for us."
I owe it to him to find out what happened and where he is." *Danica Weeks *
