News article on wandering dementia patients

It was April 27, 2009, when Uncle John left 10 Wilmington unnoticed on a fine spring afternoon and walked one mile down Wayne Ave. toward Holy Trinity Church, one of his old parishes. He fell at Wayne and Wyoming and was taken to the hospital, but as we know, that was the beginning of the end. His wrist monitor arrived within the next week, but was too late to be helpful.

This article appeared in the NY Times recently, and reminded me so much of JDM's case and others. Let's hope the article helps its readers to better understand some of the elderly members of our community. --Tim
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More Wander Off in Fog of Age
By KIRK JOHNSON
Published: May 4, 2010

ASHBURN, Va. — For generations, the prototypical search-and-rescue case in America was Timmy in the well, with Lassie barking insistently to summon help. Lost children and adolescents — from the woods to the mall — generally outnumbered all others.

But last year for the first time, another type of search crossed into first place here in Virginia, marking a profound demographic shift that public safety officials say will increasingly define the future as the nation ages: wandering, confused dementia patients like Freda Machett.

Ms. Machett, 60, suffers from a form of dementia that attacks the brain like Alzheimer’s disease and imposes on many of its victims a restless urge to head out the door. Their journeys, shrouded in a fog of confusion and fragmented memory, are often dangerous and not infrequently fatal. About 6 in 10 dementia victims will wander at least once, health care statistics show, and the numbers are growing worldwide, fueled primarily by Alzheimer’s disease, which has no cure and affects about half of all people over 85.

“It started with five words — ‘I want to go home’ — even though this is her home,” said Ms. Machett’s husband, John, a retired engineer who now cares for his wife full time near Richmond. She has gone off dozens of times in the four years since receiving her diagnosis, three times requiring a police search. “It’s a cruel disease,” he said.

Rising numbers of searches are driving a need to retrain emergency workers, police officers and volunteers around the country who say they throw out just about every generally accepted idea when hunting for people who are, in many ways, lost from the inside out.

“You have to stop thinking logically, because the people you’re looking for are no longer capable of logic,” said Robert B. Schaefer, a retired F.B.I. agent who cared for his wife, Sarah, for 15 years at home through her journey into Alzheimer’s. He now leads two-day training sessions for the Virginia Department of Criminal Justice Services.

Mr. Schaefer told his class of mostly police officers here in northern Virginia that unlike the ordinary lost child or hiker, a dementia wanderer will sometimes take evasive action to avoid detection, especially if the disease has made them paranoid about authority figures.

“We’ve found them in attics and false ceilings, in locked closets — you name it,” said Gene Saunders, a retired police officer from Chesapeake, who started a nonprofit company called Project Lifesaver 11 years ago to help find wanderers or people with other cognitive impairments. The group’s technology, fitting patients with wristbands that can be tracked by police officers with radio devices, is in use in 45 states, but its widest use is here in Virginia.

Wanderers often follow fence or power lines, and tend to be drawn toward water, Virginia state rescue officials said, bound on a mission that only they — and sometimes perhaps not even they — can imagine. (A search trick: try to figure what door they exited from, then concentrate first in that direction. But don’t bother calling out the person’s name, which he or she has often forgotten.)

Searching for them often also means learning a patient’s life story as well, including what sort of work they did, where they went to school and whether they fought in war. Because Alzheimer’s disease, the leading cause of dementia, works backward, destroying the most recent memories first, wanderers are often traveling in time as well as space.

Some World War II veterans, for example, have gone huge distances believing they needed to report to base or the front lines. A man in Virginia was lost for days until searchers, in interviews with his family, learned he had long ago been a dairy farmer, rescue officials said. It turned out he had headed for a cow pasture not far from his home, believing it was time for the morning milking.

The all-too-human stories of exhausted family members caring for Alzheimer’s sufferers must be taken in account as well, searchers say. The son or daughter or spouse who nodded off or was briefly inattentive, allowing a loved one to slip out, might feel guilty, and so understate, sometimes by many hours, how long the person has been gone — a crucial variable because time on the run in turn hugely increases the potential size of the search area.

Meanwhile, cold cases are piling up.

In Arizona, James Langston, the state’s search and rescue coordinator at the Division of Emergency Management, is haunted by the stories of people who simply stride out into the desert in high summer and vanish. A few years ago, a 20,000-square-mile area was searched after an Alzheimer’s patient’s car was found on a dirt road at the desert’s edge, he said. No trace of the person was ever found.

Advanced age, meanwhile, can compound health risks of exposure.

“We’ve had them die in as little as seven hours because they just keep going and don’t recognize they’re getting dehydrated,” Mr. Langston said.

Many states do not collect or fully categorize local data on search-and-rescue cases, so it is impossible to gauge the full impact of dementia wandering on law enforcement. But in Oregon, for example, the number of searches for lost male Alzheimer’s patients nearly doubled just last year, to 26 from 14 in 2008, and has more than tripled since 2006, according to emergency management officials.

For many people involved in those searches — or in training rescuers for the demographic tsunami to come — the turbulent emotions and grief that swirl around Alzheimer’s disease and dementia are simply part of the terrain. In the middle of his training courses, Mr. Schaefer sometimes pauses, choked up by memories of his wife, who received her Alzheimer’s diagnosis at age 50. She died 17 years later, having forgotten how to swallow, he said, and then finally, even how to breathe.

On a recent afternoon at the Northern Virginia Criminal Justice Training Academy, Mr. Schaefer told his class about the day he asked her if she knew who he was. He had taken steps by then to keep Ms. Schaefer from wandering away, disguising their home’s doors, for one thing, covering them with posters that looked like bookshelves.

But now he could see the panic and horror in her eyes, he said, that she could not find the right answer to his question. Could she recognize her own husband?

“No,” she answered. “But you take very good care of me.”

For John McClelland, 57, a retired volunteer fire and rescue officer who now leads training courses in Colorado, the story is even more personal: He has a diagnosis of Alzheimer’s himself. The disease killed his grandfather and three other people on that side of the family. He said he has already lost the ability to remember the faces of new acquaintances, even a day after meeting them.

Knowing what is coming for him as the fatal disease takes its course has made his training work all the more important and urgent, he said.

“The mission I’m on is that I’m willing to talk about Alzheimer’s as long as I’m articulate,” he said. “The hell of the disease is that I know what’s coming.”

Talking video of JDM and sister Helen posted

John D. Maloney and his sister Helen Altenburg are seen and heard in this video from around 1999-2000, made by Helen's son Steve, now posted on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NtG0eyVv-po

New JDM Photos Added, Slideshow Added

The John D. Maloney Memorial blog site now features a new slide show with photos from July-Oct 2007. This photo series is found among my (Tim's) Picasa albums at http://picasaweb.google.com/tjmaloney811/UncleJohnPixJulyOct2007#. John Altenburg contributed the photos from the WPAFB golf course, July 2007. That's his daughter Molly with JDM in several pictures, and his son Patrick and family appear as well. Several hours earlier I had left from DAY airport right after Molly arrived and JDM, Janice, John and I greeted her. A magic day for everyone, it would seem. Other pictures in that album are from the Kettering walking track during my July visit, and from the 95th birthday party at Walnut Grove in early October 2007.

John Altenburg also recently contributed more JDM pictures I had not seen, including from summer 2008 (Tank's restaurant, Dayton) and December 2008 (shopping for a winter coat). I added these to the comprehensive JDM photo collection, which comprises the first slide show on this site, and appears at the other Picasa album address in the earlier post below. You can download any of these images from Picasa.

Guide to JDM Postings

May/June, 2009

Guide to the files on the public (Windows Live) share drive folder (readme file), relating to John D. Maloney and funeral (May 19, 2009), plus other links

The newly created John D. Maloney Memorial blog now appears at http://jdmfuneral.blogspot.com/. Among the postings are the obituary and this readme file from the Windows Live site, with all its pointers.Therefore, the blog URL above is all you would have to give to a friend for access to everything.

To gain access to the Windows Live files, you should use this URL:http://cid-53ef348c10c88f42.skydrive.live.com/browse.aspx/JDM%20movies?authkey=xcP5ZZfzd5E%24
If you're logged into Windows Live on your own account, you won't get the "authkey" section in your browser, but generally you will need that section to see the files.

Tim Maloney's YouTube channel can be found at http://www.youtube.com/user/tjmaloney
The 1956 Easter video,and several others, were too large to put on the Windows Live share drive but can be seen on YouTube.

We may upload more later.

Dayton Daily News, May 17, 2009 obituary text for JDM is posted on the Windows Live site in a file called ddnobit. It is also a posting on the blog site.

Most of the computer slide show is now on Picasa, athttp://picasaweb.google.com/tjmaloney811/JohnDMaloney19122009SlideShow#
I believe the rest of my Picasa albums can be found at simply http://picasaweb.google.com/tjmaloney811 (browser URL looks different for me), and there is some more JDM content there.

The Remembrance speech appears in Word format as well as pdf. You have to imagine the strong echo in Holy Angels church, which tends to drive one's style and choice of words. Must be a benefit of graduating from Holy Angels School in 1963 and returning often to be with one or both parents. JDM gave me a lot to draw on, over a long period of time, for this work. And then it was just like him to give me just a few days to pull it together. I did the best I could, and felt his spirit working with me during that time.

Other files:

MCB051909 is a scanned pamphlet for the Mass of Christian Burial at HA. The scripture readers changed but the pamphlet was scanned as is.

youtube-picasa-tjm: Kind of a subset of this readme file. I may remove it soon.

Photos: 10-6-51 cropped and uncropped photos, taken at the Lyle home (605 Homewood, Dayton) on that date. It was a celebration of JDM's 39th birthday (which would happen 10-8-51) just before his service in Alaska during the Korean War. The 3rd photo, the mosaic (although compressed by Windows Live) was of course built around the center of that picture. Other people in the original photo are all 4 Lyle children (Carole, Kay, Janice and Jim), my parents Ed and Anita, Grandma Maloney, Joe Maloney and Helen Altenburg (who is pregnant with Steve).

Movies are all on YouTube, plus more as noted above. This is intended as an easy way to download the mpeg versions that were uploaded to YouTube. Full DVD of the Kodak film is better quality and does exist, but is not posted on the internet. The Sam Snead 1959 movie (taken at Walnut Grove CC) has had more than 10,000 hits on YouTube.

0905MaloneyLetter: JDM's last letter, sent to nephew John Altenburg, May 8, 2009. JDM died 6 days later.

I hope this material will help all of us to remember John D. Maloney and his contribution to our lives.

Tim Maloney

Dayton Daily News Obituary

Dayton Daily News, May 17, 2009

MALONEY, John David age 96, lifelong Dayton resident, died Thursday, May 14, 2009 after a brief illness. John was born Oct. 8, 1912, in St. Bernard, Ohio, near Cincinnati, the second of six children. He graduated first in his class at the former University of Dayton Prep School in 1931 and immediately began work as a federal civil servant at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base to support his widowed mother and siblings. John served as an officer in the U.S. Army Air Corps in World War II and re-entered civil service in 1946. He was called back to serve in the U.S. Air Force with the rank of major during the Korean War from 1951-53, and served mostly in Alaska. He then returned to civil service at WPAFB. In 1953, he married Anna Marita (Pat) Sharkey of Dayton. In 1956, John and Pat adopted their son Timothy J. Maloney (b. 1949) when John's older brother Edward died suddenly. John continued his civil service for the USAF at WPAFB through the 1950s and 1960s, retiring in 1970. He lived in Oakwood from 1956-2004 and retired to 10 Wilmington Place. His long life was sustained by his love of his family, his Church, the game of golf (shot his age at 87) and the University of Dayton Flyers. He was active at Holy Angels Church for over 50 years, and was a loyal UD basketball fan from 1928. He was also a founding member and officer of Walnut Grove Country Club. John kept in good health by walking and playing golf, and delighted friends and family with his Irish humor and story telling. His strength of character, loyalty and integrity will always be remembered and cherished. John's parents, siblings and beloved wife, Pat, preceded him in death. His son, Timothy, Palo Alto, Calif., sister-in-law, Norma Sharkey, Dayton, and many nieces and nephews and their children survive him. His niece, Janice Lyle Madlinger of Dayton, has the gratitude of the family for her cheerful care of her Uncle John. A prayer service will be held at 9:30 a.m. on Tuesday, May 19, 2009 at the Meyer-Boehmer & Reis Funeral Home, 1733 Brown St., Dayton, followed by a Mass of Christian Burial at 10:00 a.m. at Holy Angels Catholic Church. Burial will follow at Calvary Cemetery. Family will receive friends Monday, May 18, from 5-8 p.m. at the funeral home. In lieu of flowers, the family requests contributions to be sent in John Maloney's name to the Marian Library, University of Dayton, 300 College Park Drive, Dayton, 45469-1390 or to Holy Angels Church.