Excerpt from “’Til Death or Dementia Do Us Part”
It was not long after our trip to Santa Monica that Mike disappeared from Carmichael Oaks. He was watching TV
when I left around 3 to meet a friend for coffee. I told him I wouldn’t be gone long and reminded him that we had
plans to meet friends at 6 for dinner at a little Italian place about a mile down the road.
He barely looked up as I left. I thought I could get away with a 45-minute absence. Engrossed in conversation, I
didn’t check my watch until it was nearly 4:30. I should have set an alarm. I hurried back to the apartment. Mike
wasn’t there. I went downstairs, hoping to find him playing the piano. Not there. I checked the dining room. None
of the servers had seen him since lunchtime. No one at the front desk knew where he was. The director, Janice,
called the downstairs caregivers and asked that they search the building, including storage areas and laundry
rooms.
Mike still sometimes asked to go “home,” but was usually easily redirected from that idea. But there was that time
he’d taken off walking, headed for “home.”
Maybe … I stopped by the front office on my way out, telling Janice I was going to check at the old house. I asked
her to call my cell phone if she learned anything new.
Now dusk, I drove along busy Fair Oaks Boulevard, scanning for Mike on both sides of the street. I pulled into
the garage of our old, empty house. The key was still in its hiding place and I doubted that, if Mike had used it, he
would have put it back. Nothing, though, was predictable. I went inside, calling for Mike. There was a light on,
but I was pretty sure I’d left it on from the last time I’d been there, clearing out our remaining belongings for
storage.
I looked in every room upstairs and down, but there was no sign of Mike. In the car, on my way back to
Carmichael Oaks, I called the director to say I’d had no luck. She said the activities director had seen Mike go out
front some time between 3:30 and 4, but thought nothing of it since he often would get picked up out front for
rehearsals, or movies or lunch with friends.
Even before FTD, Mike was not a careful pedestrian. Now it was dark, and I imagined the worst. In the midst of
giving Janice a description of what Mike had been wearing so she could pass that on when she called the police,
she said, “Oh. Wait a minute.”
She was gone for a moment, then back on the phone: “He just walked in.” . . .
