Joyce Curtis is celebrating a Christmas miracle after learning her son, presumed dead for over 10 years, is still alive and may return home soon.
Curtis filed a missing person report in 2009 after not hearing from Nicholas for a while. He had gone to Europe to find work and was last heard hitchhiking across Spain and France.
“I can’t believe it,” Curtis, who lives in Glasgow, Scotland, told The Herald newspaper. “I thought with COVID and everything that has gone on, I thought he was dead. I grieved for him.”
“When I got the call to say he was alive I just went into shock,” she said. “Then, of course, I phoned my mother and I phoned my brother and I phoned my daughter to tell them.
“Everyone is asking after him now. Nikky is a good boy. The feeling is that I still can’t believe it.”
The British Consulate in Paris contacted Nicholas’s parents in 2010 to inform them that their son was in hospital. The couple flew to France to visit him. Curtis believed her son had been “living rough” on the streets.
After, Nicholas disappeared again, despite the consulate’s assurances that they would return him to Glasgow.
“I was expecting him home at Glasgow at a certain time,” Curtis explained. “I was waiting on him coming home and there was no sign.”
Curtis said she called every airport to see if her son had gotten a flight, but got no confirmation and heard nothing for over a decade, until Christmas 2022.
Curtis’s husband passed away in June this year and she had accepted that her son was gone too, when the British consulate in Paris called to inform her that Nicholas had been hospitalized again.
“It’s like a miracle,” she said.
Curtis has begun to arrange for his return but does not want to get her hopes up until he is back home. She even hopes to visit Paris, so she can see him again before he comes home.
