Few things strike fear in the hearts of parents like the threat or news of kidnapping. The kidnapping of the Lindbergh baby and subsequent search in 1932 held the whole country by the throat ... H.L. Mencken called it the "biggest story since the Resurrection" ... and led to the federal laws we have today.

The horror of the present situation for the family of Madeleine McCann ... the four-year-old British girl taken from a hotel room in Portugal and still missing as I compose this post ... is almost more than many parents can force themselves to think about in fear that acknowledging the McCann's reality could somehow tempt the terror closer to their own children.

This specific story is far from over, and like just about everyone I'm hoping and praying for a conclusion that will bring a healthy little girl back to her parents unhurt and only minimally damaged by her ordeal. Picturing any other outcome is not within the realm of my possible at this time.

I cannot comprehend how anyone finds within themselves the wherewithal ... the heart, the strength, the will ... to survive the loss of a child. It seems the tragedy would be so consuming, so crushing, that the only possible reaction would be to curl up into a ball and gradually fade away as grief corrupts every cell, then digests what is left in the foul fluids of anguish, regret, bitterness, melancholy and a sorrow deeper than any sea and as insurmountable as the highest, sheerest peak.

That a version of this sometimes happens is no surprise to me. That it often doesn't is a testament to a spirit that, surviving this, can survive anything.

Life does go on, and other commitments, often other children, require a continued participation in living no matter how impossible that may seem.

That many birth parents suffer a lifetime from their loss, I have no doubt. Some who lose rights to their children after years of possibly attempting to parent, but failing, must bring about an especially painful sort of remorse. Neither scenario, however, drops quite like the bomb from the blue as a kidnapping.

To have your child by your side one day -- healthy, happy, safe and secure, with plans and dreams of a future both near and distant -- then suddenly, totally and unpredictably not the next, without any clue to its well-being or whereabouts is the penultimate parental terror.

For more, see the next post.