Safe Return

To the Alzheimer's caregiver, night becomes the enemy. For, during the long hours of darkness is when patients in their care most often wander. They wander out of the home ... and are lost.

Life-threatening weather: bitter cold, icy rain, chilling winds are no deterrent because the disease denies these tormented women and men the ability to reason or to remember. "Their yesterdays vanish," explains one caregiver.

"My mother sent my father to buy flowers," begins Charles P. Pierce, writing in "Hard to Forget, An Alzheimer's Story" (Random House; 2000), "He was gone for three days." The flower shop was two miles from the Pierce home.

"I began to wonder if my father was dead, shot at a roadside rest stop," the son continues. "Or (maybe he was) rolled off the highway by some cowboy trucker."

In a comprehensive guide for caregivers, Mark L. Warner writes: "Probably nothing is more terrifying than the thought of your loved one wandering away from home ... The world is not always a friendly place."

Referring to the wanderers, author Pierce says, "Patients walk away from their houses in search of childhood homes. Patients abandon their living wives in search of their dead mothers."

A male patient in rural North Carolina drove to an airport; he then traveled by plane to Kansas. He did business at the Veterans Administration office and later, after again using a credit card, boarded a plane bound for Phoenix, AZ, where he knew no one. All the while, he wore only a pair of pajamas.

An estimated 60 percent of the more than four million Alzheimer's sufferers wander, defined as the repetitive, even incessant (and maddening), behavior of pacing, roaming, and, worst of all, fleeing the home.

Gather together a group of seasoned caregivers and this is what you hear: "Auntie walks slowly, measuring every step. Yet, all we have to do is turn our backs; she's out the door and gone, in the blink of an eye."

Caregiver No. 2: "John is up all night, every night. God knows what he does." Caregiver No. 3: "Nocturnal wandering is just one more hardship that comes with this insidious disease."

Not far from my home in Stone Mountain, GA, is the Briarwood Nursing Home. Last fall, Emma Simon, 81 years old and known as Aunt Emma, walked away from the residence. Described as "slightly confused," Emma nonetheless could chat you up, and was pretty good at bingo. She carried with her a fistful of quarters, her bingo winnings.

"Missing Person" fliers pictured Emma wearing glasses and a grin, perhaps because she was especially proud of her white-Afro hairstyle. This news bulletin completes our story: "A dead body found behind a storage shed in DeKalb County is that of a missing nursing home patient, police said. Friends launched a search for Emma Simon after she vanished one week ago. A $10,000 reward had been offered for Simon's safe return."

How an 81-year-old woman, standing only five feet, weighing 130 pounds, could remain "missing" an entire week remains a mystery to all who cared about, and loved, kindly Aunt Emma.

In his brilliant narrative journey into incurable Alzheimer's ("the story of the research into the disease, and the story of the people to whom that research is so very important.") author Pierce suggests: "We bother with each other less and less.In this, Alzheimer's is the precise disease for an age of insular charity and averted eyes. So, when they wander, and stand soaked on the sidewalk, abandoned even by themselves, it is easier not to know them."

Social scientists predict that by the year 2050 the Alzheimer's population in the United States will total 15 million. There will be no easy way then to avert eyes or deny the existence of hordes of demented, and needy, mothers and fathers, grandmothers and aunts, brothers and cousins.