PHUKET, Thailand - After spending days poring over photos of corpses, wandering through tsunami -wrecked beach resorts and prowling through Thai hospital wards, Catherine and David Smith decided to end their search for their two missing friends.
The turning point came when the Canadian couple traveled 90 miles north to the Andaman Beach Resort in Khao Lak, where John and Jackie Knill of North Vancouver had stayed. Their hotel had been obliterated.
"That removed most, if not all, of the uncertainty," David Smith said.
So, joined by two Knill relatives, the Smiths held a memorial service on that beach, with a Buddhist prayer and flowers tossed into the sea.
"We said our goodbye. All the time we were looking out to the surf, where everything looked like it should. It was beautiful," David Smith said. "And we had our back to what was once Khao Lak."
When the tsunami struck, many bodies were swept out to sea, hastily buried in mass graves, cremated or held in morgues for identification. Some were later exhumed for DNA samples.
Three weeks after the disaster, even the most persistent are having to give up and return to jobs and households in Europe and North America. But for local people left behind, the pain could be far harder to shake, since they remain surrounded by death, destruction and a rebuilding effort that could take years.
"As time goes by with not finding a loved one, reality will sink in. Viewing the devastation of the area also helps to face reality that 'yes this terrible awful thing did happen,"' said Margaret Miles, a professor at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill who has worked with disaster survivors and grieving parents.
"On the other hand, not giving up the search may occur if individuals want to hold on to the notion that this really didn't happen, like it's still a bad dream." she said in an interview by e-mail.
In Thai beach resorts such as Phuket, the relief centers, hospitals and morgues set up in Buddhist temples are no longer filled with dazed and crying people searching for their friends and relatives.
But in Sri Lanka, where children accounted for a staggering 12,000 of the 31,000 dead, many parents are continuing to search.
"The parents never give up," said Tahirih Qurratulayn, a therapist who works with Save the Children in Sri Lanka. "Only the intensity of the searches goes down." She said many parents feel an overwhelming sense of guilt for having failed to save their children.
