the life of those who love the missing

This is sad news.

Lindsey Baum, the 11-year-old girl from McCleary, Washington, whose case I have followed in this blog since her disappearance last June 26, is still missing.

You would think, then, that her mother had already experienced her lowest point in what was already not an easy life.

Some self-proclaimed internet sleuths and psychic rumormongers have delighted in vilifying Melissa Baum, mostly, it seems, out of frustration at having no real progress to report in the case. That she should be so caddy as to continue to have actual, real problems in her actual, real life as a single mother with an emotionally challenged child... Well, how dare she muck up the romance of the situation?

Seldom is the reference to good things when we heave a prim sigh and pronounce that "life must go on..."

Should those on the hovering periphery of tragedy opt for life, then life will demand its way.

(Famously, Edna St. Vincent Millay said: “Life must go on; I forget just why.”)

The mother of missing girl Lindsey Baum has new troubles, as not only has she lost her daughter; now she's lost her home.

"I never thought we'd be homeless, and we are," said Melissa Baum. She and her son can't afford another night in the Tumwater motel they've been staying.

"We have truly lost everything," she said.

Paralyzed by pain, Melissa Baum hasn't worked since her daughter Lindsey disappeared from McCleary while walking home last June.

"You feel like you're being suffocated every waking moment," Melissa Baum said.

She's survived on her son's Social Security, but that wasn't enough to remain in the home they rented before Lindsey vanished.

"What if she gets away and comes home... and we're not there?" Melissa Baum worried. "As hard as it was to walk by bedroom and see police tape and not go in there, she still had a room."

But Baum says her son with special needs could no longer cope in McCleary.

"He has horrible nightmares every night," she said.

Josh expresses guilt over fighting with Lindsey before she disappeared and not walking her home. His behavior problems have escalated and Baum says that prompted a relative who took them in to lock them out.

The Problem Solvers have paid for Baum to stay another two weeks at the motel. The extended stay gives Baum time to send her son back East for the summer to stay with his dad while she looks for work, a place to live, and her missing daughter.

"I would live in a hotel or car the rest of my life if it would bring my daughter home," she said.

Baum is working with the housing authority in Thurston County to find a subsidized apartment but says she's told there's little hope of an opening before July

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