Missing, yet still a presence

SAN FRANCISCO — The daylong event honoring the computer-science whiz who helped create automated teller machines will be part celebration, part science fair.

But don't call it a memorial or funeral. That would be too final.

The commemoration of Jim Gray's life on Saturday is billed as a "tribute," as if the 6-foot-3 Microsoft Corp. researcher might stroll right into UC Berkeley's Wheeler Hall for the kind of academic symposium he loved to attend, where experts come together to solve a problem.

In this case, though, the hundreds of technologists and Silicon Valley executives who are expected will have to confront the one puzzle they couldn't crack: What happened to Jim Gray?

This is known: On Jan. 28, 2007, a clear, calm Sunday, the world-renowned scientist set out across the San Francisco Bay toward the Golden Gate Bridge on his 40-foot red sailboat named Tenacious to scatter his mother's ashes. He never returned.

Since February 2007, when friends from across the high-tech field ended one of the most sophisticated amateur searches for a missing person in U.S. history, there has been no public remembrance for Gray. His friends and colleagues have slipped back to their own lives, privately grappling with their loss and their theories about what happened to him.

People go missing every day. How families, friends and co-workers face their inability to find a loved one and live with the mystery often depends on their culture and how they look at life's challenges, said Pauline Boss, an expert on grief who is speaking at the event and has consulted with the family on how to commemorate Gray.

"If you think in absolutes, you either got the answer or you didn't," she said. "The challenge is, how can you move forward without feeling like you failed or feel good even though you did not find the answer? It requires binary thinking instead of absolute thinking -- he's probably dead but maybe not."

When Gray was first reported missing, some speculated that he had meant to disappear and was hiding somewhere. But Gray's friends have calculated the odds that he's still alive and know they're slim. They now believe that the boat was struck by debris or another vessel and went down quickly, then was swept out to deep sea.

But these are captains of industry and technology, people who think there's no problem that can't be solved with money or Silicon Valley know-how. Although they concluded they had failed, some are dealing with their grief by trying to fix its cause. They believe their search for Gray pointed to new ways for technology to help future search-and-rescue efforts.