Hope and grief tear at pained hearts of MH370 families

Watching the heartache of the passengers' relatives has us asking how long hope can last. Photo/AP

What is hope? And when do we surrender it?

The disappearance of flight MH370 and the insatiable media appetite for human heartache generated by it has peeled back a normally private layer to reveal how people cope (or rather how they don't) when tragedy and mystery combine.

In the absence of any concrete information on what happened to the aircraft and when, the spotlight inevitably turned to the tangible: the despair, the rage, the TV-friendly tears of waiting family, which will always propel a news story to the front page.

Despite the best efforts of airline officials to keep the pain hidden behind closed doors, our nightly news digest has shown images of grief-stricken family members played on loop. Whether we choose to admit it or not, there is a side to all of us that thrives on the misfortunes of others - this being the ultimate manifestation of that.

The simple truth is that while we refresh our screens to find out "the latest" on this month's most popular news story, far greater tragedies are unfolding with very little fanfare.

Two hundred and thirty-nine passengers are presumed dead. That's about half the number of Egyptians sentenced to death this week in a puppet political courtroom, and even that barely registers when compared to the thousands whose lives have ended in unremarkable fashion due to famine, disease and violence.

It does shine a spotlight on the question of the value of a life versus the public perception of the value of a life.

Back to hope.

It can be roundly defined as feeling that what is wanted can be had ... that events will turn out for the best. Given this understanding, I find it hard to imagine myself in the shoes of those still holding on to hope, and what it must feel like as a parent, brother or child to slowly feel the hope drain out like blood from a fatal wound.

Hope is part of grief - tied up somewhere with denial - and observing the mostly Chinese families of MH370 passengers deal so publicly with their hope and grief has made me wonder how much of our emotions are socially constructed.

It is perhaps an unfair generalisation but it seems from the outside looking in that, while others commenting publicly seem to have moved forward from denial and anger to depression and acceptance, many Chinese families believe the plane is parked up somewhere as part of some warped government conspiracy, or carelessly misplaced through some avoidable corporate blunder.

In light of China's "interesting" political history, perhaps this should come as no surprise. After all, people have been disappearing there for generations. But the net result is that hope remains where there is none, and the unimaginable process of acceptance remains beyond reach.

Although the prospect of getting any sort of answer from the bottom of the Indian Ocean wrapped up in a black box with a red ribbon on top seems remote, at least the smallest scrap of wreckage will be a trophy to proof, which is far less than hope, but is an answer of sorts still, and a stepping stone along grief's path.