Families face Christmas with absence that never fades

Laying the table for Christmas dinner three months after his teenage son went missing was its own kind of heartbreak.

- Tara Cobham, The Independent

Peter Boxell remembers 25 December 1988 as a day spent clinging to hope, desperately willing his son Lee to come home.Attempting to will that hope into reality, he laid a place at the table for him. But as darkness fell, the devastating realisation crept in that Lee would not be coming home. He still hasn’t. “I had hoped Lee might come home or we might hear from him — obviously I wanted him to come home for Christmas,” Mr Boxell told The Independent. “We had an extra space at the table for him for Christmas dinner in case he came home. It was just heartbreaking.”

Mr Boxell is among a number of family members who have opened up about how “horrific” it can be to spend Christmas without a missing loved one, as The Independent's Christmas campaign, SafeCall, reaches its £165,000 target to launch a new national lifeline for missing young people, alongside the charity Missing People.