One of us is missing. The Silver Alert sign is flashing its warning as I drive down I-95. A Silver Alert sign is as frightening to me as an Amber Alert for missing children. It's chilling. The Silver Alert sign means a lost soul needs help.
I keep an eye out for whatever information the sign has given, usually a make and model of an automobile. It's impossible not to wonder who has gone missing. A father, grandmother, a beloved aunt or uncle. And why are they missing? Did they start out to just run a simple errand and then forgot their way? Or, when no one was looking did they steal the car keys?
Is it a man? Is it a woman? Is the missing one new-old, old-old, or a super-ager?
Are they lost in an unfamiliar town? Perhaps they're running away from a rehab facility...in some cases also known as a nursing home. (I knew someone who escaped from a nursing home. The enterprising senior pushed his walker right into the elevator and down to the parking lot where a car waited. He was discovered and recaptured within twenty-four hours. In the interest of full disclosure, I was married to him. Yes, I drove the getaway car but he told me he'd been released.)
If you have a writer's imagination you begin to worry about the missing. Those of us over fifty-five years of age are encouraged to live in senior communities. Following the herding instinct, we congregate in these villages to feel safe, to feel as if we belong. We fall into a mostly comfortable, homogeneous lifestyle. Unless something awesome happens.
Awesome like the 1985 Ron Howard film "Cocoon." A delightful story of folks living in a retirement community who, one day, trespass into a swimming pool containing alien cocoons. The happy retirees undergo a transformation and emerge energized and with much-appreciated youthful vigor. At film's end, some return to the alien's planet to experience immortality -- without family and friends. They went missing. On a great adventure.
Fantasy is fun but back in the real world, the missing silver seniors have not been whisked away to another planet. Facing reality we understand that the missing just might be lost for the moment...or for all time.
November is National Alzheimer's Awareness Month. Johns Hopkins reminds us that there are 6 million Americans living with this brain disease today. And there are fewer than 1 in 5 of us who are familiar with MCI, mild cognitive impairment, often a precursor to Alzheimer's. MCI is characterized by losing things often, forgetting to go to events or appointments, and having more trouble coming up with words than other people of the same age.
Any senior can go missing at any time. It may not be on the highway when we receive a signal. So as we move forward let us answer the Silver Alerts with compassion. And let's support the Alzheimer's Association in November and in every month. We must keep hope in our hearts.
We owe it to the missing.
