What Does Closure Feel Like?

By Scott Althaus, Project Recover volunteer and cousin of 2Lt. Thomas V. Kelly, Jr. who was killed on March 11, 1944 and repatriated on Memorial Day 2025.

Project Recover describes its mission as finding and repatriating Americans Missing In Action (MIA) “to provide recognition and closure for families and the Nation.” That word closure is an important one for describing Project Recover’s impact. I’m in one of the rare MIA family members who has experienced this closure twice: the first time in 2018 when we learned that my relative’s once-missing World War Two bomber named “Heaven Can Wait” had been found by Project Recover, and a second time in 2025 when we buried my relative’s remains in his hometown of Livermore, California. So I’m in an unusual position to describe what closure feels like.

My family’s journey through two experiences of closure was unusual. Most families of the more than 81,000 American MIAs never receive any closure at all. For a fortunate few, the initial news comes from out of the blue in a phone call from the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency (DPAA) saying that their relative’s remains have been recovered. Not only is this news completely unexpected for most families, it immediately transitions to a series of stressful decisions about burial arrangements. The suddenness of it all leaves little time to process what closure means until long after that funeral is over. 

My experience was different because my family initiated contact with Project Recover in the first place. We passed them results from four years of research on the likely whereabouts of our relative’s missing plane, in hopes that they would find it. 

The First Closure: Finally Knowing—and Seeing—Where Tommy Died

Everything the family knew about Tommy’s death came from four sentences in his commander’s condolence letter: it happened somewhere over Papua New Guinea during a combat mission, it was sudden, and there was no possibility of survivors. That was it. No body coming home. No details. No location. 

Our four years of research filled the gaps about what happened during Tommy’s final mission and gave us a very good sense of where the plane might be found today. And because we had supplied information that helped Project Recover find the plane, unlike most MIA families we were allowed under DPAA rules to learn from Project Recover that they had discovered the plane’s wreckage. 

That news came in a conference call between me and several Project Recover members on Good Friday of 2018. They said their underwater robots had found the plane more than 200 feet under the surface of a bay in a remote coastal area of Papua New Guinea. Right after the call ended they also shared a 12-minute video documenting the mission along with a detailed report of what they found, including maps of the debris field and images of the bombardier’s section of the crew compartment where my relative died.  

Through the video and the report, the living relatives of 2Lt. Thomas Kelly finally saw the place where his remains had been resting all this time. After 74 years of wondering, we finally knew. And we cried. We cried so much it surprised us, because by then our own research had already filled in the once-missing details of how he died. But seeing that front wheel of the bomber mixed with wreckage of the bombardier’s compartment—so deep underwater that even in midday only a dim light made it all the way down to where the wreckage lay—the tears that flowed throughout the family marked the release of a grief that had been transmitted unresolved across generations. We finally knew. We finally saw. We finally could let go. 

When Project Recover shared news of the plane’s discovery, they also said that the plane’s wreckage was far deeper than the deepest underwater recovery of crew remains that had ever been done. So we knew that the prospects of recovering remains would be uncertain at best. In that light, this experience of seeing and finally knowing where Tommy was after all these years would have allowed us to put Tommy’s death behind us. But our journey wasn’t over yet.

The Second Closure: Welcoming Tommy Home

Right before Tommy’s extended set of living relatives were notified that his plane had been found, Project Recover had sent the DPAA a detailed survey of the wreck site. It provided the DPAA with highly specific information about the likelihood of recovering crew remains from the wreckage. The results of that survey were so compelling that five years later the DPAA and the Navy’s Experimental Diving Unit launched a mission to recover remains of the 11 members of the “Heaven Can Wait” crew.

That mission—which required Navy divers to live in a pressurized environment that allowed them to work at depth for weeks without ever decompressing—took place across March and April of 2023. At the conclusion of that mission, the DPAA told “Heaven Can Wait” families that human remains were recovered. But we didn’t know whose. And it would be a long time before those remains could be positively identified.

In the fall of 2023 the DPAA released personal effects for three of the crew members that had been found in the wreckage, including Tommy’s dog tags and bombardier class ring. We knew this was a good sign, because it meant the divers had been dredging where Tommy’s remains were likely to be found. So when the call from DPAA finally came in November 2024—to my cousin Kathy Borst, who is Tommy’s primary next of kin—we already had been hopeful that Tommy’s remains might be coming home 81 years after he died.

On Memorial Day 2025, Tommy’s remains were buried in his hometown of Livermore, California, next to those of his parents and his sister Betty. As the funeral date approached I wrote about the meaning of this day to Tommy’s family, but nothing prepared me for the moment that the casket containing his remains was brought out from the cargo hold of an American Airlines jet. As I approached the casket and put my hand on the polished wood, I was happy. I was smiling. I had tears, but the joyful kind—the day I had only dreamed about over the 12 years we had been on this journey was actually here. He was finally coming home. 

After the funeral mass three days later, Tommy’s living relatives got into cars to follow the hearse past places that were important to Tommy—his high school, the old downtown, his family home. Along the route residents of Livermore gathered in groups to stand and pay their respects as the hearse drove by. I noticed one woman smiling through tears, hand over heart to express her gratitude for Tommy’s sacrifice. As the hearse rounded the last corner into the cemetery, standing there was a family with two boys who raised small flags as the hearse drove by. This was not just our family’s day. It was a homecoming for the people of Livermore. He was their Tommy too.

What Closure Feels Like

I watched in silence as the casket containing Tommy’s remains lowered slowly into the place prepared for him in the family plot. Tommy’s final resting place was not at the bottom of Hansa Bay where we thought he would be forever, but next to the father and mother and sister that loved him so fiercely that their unresolved grief left them unable to speak their memories of him into the next generation. 

What I felt in those moments watching the casket’s descent will take time to sort out, and even a year later I am struggling with the incompleteness of the words I have for that experience. In the weeks and months after the tears and emotions of that funeral weekend gave way to fond memories and warm feelings, I could at last start sorting out what closure felt like. It felt like a very small part of the universe that had been persistently out of alignment had shifted at that funeral, back into its proper place. 

Have you ever driven the same car for long enough to know when something sounds slightly off? Like the tiniest pebble lodged in a tire that ticks, ticks, ticks its way down the slow roads and runs t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t on the faster ones, the absence of closure is a kind of subtle presence in the background noise that most people wouldn’t notice. But you notice, because it’s your car and it’s not supposed to be there. No matter how enjoyable the conversation or how great the music, your attention keeps getting pulled back to its distracting presence, because that little sound in the background is so out of place. 

And then suddenly it’s gone. What’s left is just the hum of rolling tires, as it’s supposed to be. And with that return to normal comes the knowledge that because that pebble dropped off somewhere on the road you’ve left behind, you will never pick it up again no matter how many times you pass the same stretch of highway. 

That is what closure feels like. The kind of closure that lets you move on. 

That’s the kind of closure that the families of the seven still-missing “Heaven Can Wait” crew members have yet to experience. It’s the kind of closure that few living relatives of more than 81,000 American MIAs will ever experience. It’s the closure that Project Recover is uniquely positioned to bring if we can keep putting teams out in the field to do the work of finding and repatriating our country’s missing. 

You can join this effort by spreading the word about Project Recover’s work, and the kind of closure that Project Recover makes possible for families like mine.