Image Credit: SUBMITTED/Wikimedia Commons and B.C. RCMP

KAMLOOPS - After 14 agonizing weeks, a missing Alberta man’s family is starting to realized they may never find their son and are struggling as they move on.

Heather and Scott Shtuka left their home in Beaumont, Alta. as soon as they heard Ryan didn't make it home after a house party on Burfield Drive in Sun Peaks on Feb. 17, and a missing person report had been filed for him.

They vowed to keep searching, refusing to go home until he was found, but nearly four months later they realize that doesn’t look possible.

"I've always said I thought having that text come in saying that Ryan was missing… I thought that was going to be the worst thing that I'd ever hear in my entire life," Heather says. "But I've since learned there would be many more things that would be more terrible to hear.”

Every day they have searched, joined mostly on weekends by dozens of volunteers and every day she heard the terrible words: No news.

Heather had hoped once the snow melted in Sun Peaks that they would find Ryan, but spring revealed no clues, no evidence of where Ryan might be.

Now they are confronting their “new normal” without him.

For the first time since they arrived here, Heather is heading home for her oldest daughter's 18th birthday and high school graduation. She's also getting their youngest daughter ready for a school trip to Quebec.

"(Our daughters have) allowed us to be gone for so long that it would be remiss of me as her mother to not be home for something that’s so important for her and for us," Heather says.

Scott will be back and forth between Sun Peaks and Beaumont for the next few weeks, and will return home after Father's Day. After that, Heather and Scott won't be coming back to Sun Peaks until the end of July. They anticipate returning to Sun Peaks until he is found.

Kamloops Search and Rescue and Kamloops RCMP attended Sun Peaks this past weekend to help with the search and again: No news.

"I thought I had prepared myself for search and rescue to come and RCMP to come and not find him, but again I wasn’t prepared for it," Heather says. "I wanted for us this nightmare to have an end.”

There's been no evidence to suggest that Ryan left the hill at any point, Heather says, so they continue to search there until a credible tip or piece of evidence comes in to tell them otherwise. 

"I don’t have the answer and I'm no closer to knowing this," Heather says. "Of course my fear is that he's passed, and that doesn’t change. How the ending came about changes quite a bit for me."

Her biggest fear is that Ryan will remain a missing person, that their family will never know where he is, how he got there, or what the last moments of his life were like.

She once held hope that once the snow melted, Ryan would be found, completely preserved. She would get to look at his face one last time, hold him, and say everything a mother would want to say to their child.

"It just seems extraordinary, it's unimaginable. I never thought that this would be the outcome, I never thought we'd be searching for so long," Heather says. "I haven’t seen Ryan since Dec. 1 and now I'm robbed of getting to see him one last time and say what I need to say."

Ryan won't be joining them for his sisters’ milestone and that will be their new normal, and as painful as it is for them, they need to be there for their daughters. For now, the Shtukas hang on to all of the memories they have of their son.

"Ryan's memory and his legacy may be the only thing that is left to us. I hoard that."

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