Missing plane mum: The secret we shared before he got on the flight

As news breaks about the fate of the missing Malaysia Airlines flight, this Perth mum shares the reasons why she’s fighting to keep her husband’s face in our minds, and the eerie conversation he had just before he left.

It’s been almost two weeks since Malaysian Airlines Flight MH370 disappeared. Behind the packed media conferences and conspiracy theories is a woman desperate to know where her husband is.

Paul Weeks was leaving his family to start a dream job in Mongolia that would see him separated from his wife and two young boys for four weeks. In the days leading up to his departure, the family were together every second. The devoted dad took his older son Lincoln to the zoo, he hosted a family dinner for his mum and brother and spent every single moment bonding with his boys, painting the house and telling his family how much he loved them.

But it's a conversation the couple had just before New Year's Eve that is haunting Danica Weeks the most.

Paul and Danica were involved in a serious car accident not far from their home at the end of last year. "The crash was a massive wake-up call,” she told Perth Now. The couple had barely survived a New Zealand earthquake before relocating to Perth. The car accident was their second brush with death. “After that we decided to sort our wills.

“He asked me how I would bring up the kids without him. I said, ‘no I don’t want to do that’, but then he said I had to. He said, ‘I need to tell you my wishes’, and so I told him mine. I’m glad we had that talk.”

His secret wish was that she would keep him alive. He wanted to his boys to know him, to be reminded of how much he loved them and to remember the times they'd shared together.

Over the past 11 days, Danica has been closely following her husband's wish by sharing her story. “And with Paul saying he wanted me to keep him alive, I just thought that even if just one person read something about him they would get an idea of who Paul Weeks was."

“Plus I want there to be something tangible for the boys. I hope that one day they will think, ‘great mum you got to say something about dad’. I adore that man and I want the whole world to know.”

Danica's last correspondence with her husband took place just hours before the plane dropped off the radar. He sent her an email from Kuala Lumpur saying he missed them already. She responded by telling him that she'd cried so hard after dropping him off at the airport she had to wear sunglasses at their son's soccer practice.

He responded, writing:

yeah, yeah, yeah I love you too. You are my world, you complete me you and the boys

He was meant to ring once he landed in Beijing but the call never came. Later that day she received a call from a journalist explaining what had happened. The journalist advised her to contact the New Zealand consulate and she's been shrouded in darkness ever since.

“That’s the hardest part,” she said. “There is a part of me that doesn’t want to know, a part that wants to be blissfully unaware and cling on to some hope, but I know eventually I need to accept it. I need to know if my Paulie is coming back and if he is not then I have to adjust to that with the boys.”

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