During the early days of crippling mental disorder after Juliette died, my mind flitted about like a mad child, chucking up thoughts that were not born of reason or rational process. Juliette was elsewhere. I had to reach her and my messed up brain had me make lists of what I could offer that would reverse the shocking error of her absence.

I begged nameless powers to take my limbs, my eyes and my life. I longed for the chance to eat putrefied road kill, excrement, anything to buy her back. In those moments, it was convenient to forget how I had watched as doctors failed to resuscitate my daughter, that I had held her little body as it grew cold, and seen her buried. The madness of fantasy seduced me. It drew me from the brink and plunge of knowing I would never see her again.

When after weeks my Faustian pacts came to naught, I grasped at comfort by imagining ways in which my loss could have been worse. Juliette died, as far as I knew, without pain. Steph and I were with her and she did not have to bear her last minutes alone. No one took her life, or hurt her. It did not change the fact of her death, but I looked around at the losses of other parents and it made me feel mine was slightly less terrible.

It sounds a cruel way to draw comfort, but I had to survive. I thought of a mother who was robbed even of her daughter’s body to bury, and denied the knowledge of her final hours. I wondered how she could grieve in this tortuous state of suspense, while any hope remained that her child might still be alive.

When Juliette died, Madeleine McCann was still safe with her parents, but my mind kept returning to the family of Ben Needham, the little boy who vanished on a Greek Island. I wondered whether years on, his parents had been able to accept he was probably dead, and if that acceptance brought peace, or only guilt and more suffering. I looked at Juliette’s death in the grip of leukaemia and became the mother who was grateful to have held her child’s lifeless body.

Last week, when Amanda Berry broke out of her ten-year incarceration with two other women all believed to have been dead, my first thought was not jubilation. Instead, I thought about the hurt to my more recently bereaved friends who like I once did would have imagined for a brief but agonising instant that their children might also return, before remembering it was impossible.

It’s a good news story. These daughters and sisters have returned to their families after a decade of grief, but my thoughts are with parents whose children are gone forever. In my thoughts I’m afraid there’s also a little self pity. Amanda Berry disappeared nine months after we lost Juliette. Of course, I would not wish Juliette to have endured what these women have, but a ghost of my mad brain whispers new pacts, and wonders what I would not give even now to hold a sixteen-year-old Juliette in my arms.