The tangibility of an absent death. An interview with Rosa Abad Polo, a searching mother and victim of the disappearance of two family members

Entrevista a Rosa Abad Polo, madre buscadora y víctima de la desaparición de dos familiares

Abstract

This work addresses the disappearance of persons as one of the most stark and extreme manifestations of contemporary violence, drawing on the testimony of a woman searching for her missing loved ones. Without strictly defining itself as an interview or an academic article, this text aims to serve as a starting point for generating analytical reflections on the significance of disappearance in the present. Through the case of Rosa Abad Polo—who has faced the disappearance of her husband since 2008 and the disappearance of her son in 2025—this account is described as a double disappearance with ambivalent effects: a suspension that disrupts life and keeps the subject in a state of permanent torment, until the discovery of the lifeless body of one of her relatives. In this context, the search takes shape as yet another dimension of alienation, through a form of forced labor and self-exploitation that “produces no value” in capitalist terms, but constitutes an economy of pain, memory, and resistance. The account of someone who has gone through these processes and, at the same time, understands disappearance, death, and the symbolic healing that the discovery of a loved one can bring, even in the absence of physical life.