Man listens to his mother's last words to him before she boarded missing Malaysian Airlines flight

It is 24 days since Flight MH370 vanished without a trace, and over the course of more than three weeks the families of the 239 onboard have endured an agonising state of limbo.

Whilst few really believe that their loved ones can possibly be alive, hope must remain, because it can, and it must, so they can carry on.

The search may be relentless and the efforts considerable, but it has so far proved fruitless. No wreckage has actually been found.

Today, I got an insight into what their daily existence is like.

Steve Wang is the son of a 57-year-old woman onboard, but he won’t name her, because saying her name out loud, writing it down, in association with this tragedy, makes his loss a reality.

Logically, he says, he knows it is nearly impossible she survived but he has to hold onto the belief she could have, until he is shown something definitive to the contrary.

He still has the final voice message she sent him, moments before boarding the plane, asking him to tell his father to bring her warm clothes to the airport when he collects her. She may be cold, she tells him.

Today, he played it to me. It was the first time he’d listened to it since the day she left it, and it reduced him to tears.

She was a professor who recently retired, and had taken up photography. Her greatest joy was travelling abroad with a group of fellow enthusiasts to take pictures.

Now, he keeps many of them on his mobile phone. They are photographs that capture life around Asia at its most beautiful.

In the days leading up to March 8 she was in Nepal doing just that, and was taking Flight MH370 from Kuala Lumpur to return home to her son and husband.

Since the plane disappeared, Steve, like 400 other relatives of the 154 Chinese passengers onboard, has stopped working and started living at the Lido Hotel in Beijing.

Daily, they take prayers together and campaign for the truth, refusing to accept the Malaysian prime minister’s statement that those on the flight all perished.

Steve leads the prayers and guides the other relatives through their grief, channelling his own anguish in this way to avoid thinking about what his mother may have experienced.

He has vowed to find out what happened to the plane, even if it takes him his whole life. A remarkable young man.