A Decade of Pain Wipes Out All Hope in Family of Missing Child : San Francisco: Kevin Collins was 10 when he vanished. Kin held memorial service to let him go, but their lives will never be the same.

He would be a man now.

That’s the hardest thing to understand, looking into the eyes of the freckle-faced boy who stares from posters and flyers in the office of the foundation that bears his name.

Hair mussed, eyes big with an am-I-in-trouble look, 10-year-old Kevin Collins peers over his shoulder in the picture that has graced a hundred thousand flyers.

It’s easy to imagine him with three of his brothers stealing change for candy from the wishing pond at Golden Gate Park. It’s easy to imagine him dirty from fighting schoolyard battles for his younger brothers at St. Agnes School. It’s not easy to imagine him dead.

Only now, 10 years after he disappeared off a San Francisco street corner on his way home from basketball practice one winter night, has his family begun to be able to imagine him that way.

A year ago, the other eight Collins children, now 17 to 29, went to their mother Ann and said, “We need to let Kevin be at peace.”

Then they approached their father, the director and “chief cook and bottle washer” of the Kevin Collins Foundation for Missing Children.

“They came to me eight months ago. They said they wanted a resolution,” said 54-year-old David Collins.

“I think it will make it easier . . . ,” said the thin man in a subdued gray sweater who has devoted his life to searching, first for his son, then for other missing children when hope for his son’s return dimmed.

On Feb. 10, the family gathered at Holy Cross Cemetery for a private memorial service. There, they dedicated a simple granite bench nestled between two trees. It bears Kevin’s picture and the engraved words, “Forever in our hearts.”

“It’s a special place in the new area for children. It’s beautiful.” said his mother, Ann Deasy Collins. She sits with hands clasped tightly together, looking younger than her 54 years in the foundation’s San Francisco office.

“I think we have all accepted that Kevin is dead. For a long time we hardly talked.”

When they held a family meeting to discuss the memorial, it was the first time in years they’d all been in the same room.

“Kevin has brought us together again.”

She has come during her lunch hour from her job as secretary to a painting contractor. She looks too tiny to have borne seven children.

The years after Kevin’s disappearance were hard on the family. Traumas like the one the Collinses endured don’t heal easily, and the scars spawn their own troubles.

All of the other children--including a foster child and a cousin who grew up with the family--were troubled. One day their brother was there, the next day he was gone. The kids had trouble sleeping. Their grades slipped.

The three youngest, who roamed as a fearless band together with Kevin, were afraid to leave the family apartment. Eventually the three oldest dropped out of school. Five years later David and Ann divorced. It was an amicable parting. Neither attributes it directly to Kevin’s disappearance.

“It takes you down to basics--really shows you who you are and what’s important,” David said. Maybe things would have worked out differently if they hadn’t lost Kevin.

Only a few of the children have spent time at the foundation. “They stay out of here,” said their father, looking around the clearly nonprofit office that has become his second home. “I knew after he was gone that this was going to be my life’s work.”

For Ann, the focus was the children. “We were blessed because we had a large family, we had something to put our energy into.”

“I can’t imagine what it would have been like if he’d been an only child. I wouldn’t still be here. I couldn’t have taken it,” she said.

But Kevin isn’t gone. Tellingly, when she goes down the list to get the ages of her children right, she still includes Kevin, right between Gary, 21, and Kenny, 18.

It has taken years for the family to come out of shock, she said. It was especially hard for the other children, always being the sibling of “that boy who disappeared.”

But life has gone on.

Kenny graduated from high school last year. Stephen, 24, got married in January. There are three grandchildren; 29-year-old Laura has a daughter and Michelle, 26, has a girl and a boy.

Ann said she thinks the memorial will let them put Kevin to rest. But she doesn’t expect to get over it--ever.

“It turns your life upside down. Sometimes it seems like there’s only before-Kevin and after-Kevin.”

Out of the whole family, David has been caught the most. He’s channeled his grief into searching for missing children. Several state laws that help keep child murderers behind bars bear his mark.

“I’ve changed. I’m not the same person I was when Kevin disappeared. We wouldn’t know him if he came back today. And maybe he wouldn’t know us.”

David Collins stopped. His long frame tensed a little and an expression of sadness washed over his face.

“No, he’d know me. I know he’d know me.”