Gone: the Disappearances of Many
Disappearance is unavoidable in life. The loss of a child, a career, one’s self, a friend, a pet, a cherished item. The sudden changes that happen in life are often painful and unexpected. For many seniors, these disappearances represent turning points of great change and development.
However, they cause growth.
So what can be learned from disappearances? And how can they be overcome?
Dannean Farris — “It’s heartbreaking to lose a child, in any form, whether they’re still alive or not, it’s painful.”
A mother says goodbye to her son on a trip to visit his father in Miami. But, he never returned. Dannean Farris is no stranger to loss. The death of her grandfather at 11, divorced at 17, and later without her son. There was, as Farris describes it, a “bitter divorce” and her son, who has Aspergers, dealt with a lot of “emotional issues, so we were always taking him to different doctors for treatment.” While her ex-husband paid for treatment in Miami, Farris remained in Atlanta. She “knew from past experience that I couldn’t win [custody], and I had already been shot down twice when trying to resolve things.” From around his 10th birthday throughout highschool Farris’ only contact with her son was through an occasional phone call. She remembers asking him “how school’s going, while my heart was breaking while talking to him on the phone, trying to think of things to ask him but I didn’t know about life, day to day, or what was most important to him.” Unknown to Farris, he frequently used drugs and alcohol, but she “knew he wasn’t getting everything he needed, he didn’t have a mother, and I have a lot of guilt over that.”
Despite the fact that they never lost connection, “you lost that day to day parent-child relationship that’s so important. Even when he came to see me… I tried so hard to make up for lost time, but there’s no way to do that. Just no way to make it up.” Even the visits were painful because “he changed so much and I didn’t get to see the changes.”
Victoria “Vikki” Cooper — “I was the one who disappeared, and I didn’t even realize.”
How to Disappear:
- Travel in a camper cross country
My husband and I and my two little girls were in a camper traveling around the country. The girls were three and five. It was a big, 20-foot camper, and we were traveling around the country for 6 months to decide where to move from Boston. I wasn’t paying attention to where I came from and wasn’t tracking myself. I didn’t even know the street name of where we were parked.
2. Look for donuts
I love Dunkin Donuts or any other donuts… so I said to Kent, my husband, ‘I’m going to go out and look for donuts’, since we didn’t have any treats in the camper. So, I go out to this one bakery near where we were parked in Seattle. But, the bakery owner didn’t have donuts but said that a few blocks away, they did. I went past the camper, and I have a terrible sense of direction. I went on my way and found the donut store after about an hour. At the store, I couldn’t remember how to get back to the camper. After another hour, I get back to the Winnebago, and no Kent.
3. Have a caring family
My husband was so worried something had happened and he saw a man leave an alley, assumed the worst and thought he might have hurt me and chased after the man. According to the police, he followed the man for six miles. When I get back to the camper, I find the girls scared in the truck. Shortly after I got back, Kent shows up in a police cruiser. When chasing this guilty-looking man, he saw a police cruiser and ran over, convinced the police to go after the guy, and arrested him. The man had no idea what happened and hadn’t done anything, so Kent was embarrassed and the police drove him the six miles back to the camper.
4. Sort it all out
When Kent got back, I thought he went on a walk and got lost and the police took him back. I asked him ‘what happened?’ and ‘why weren’t you here?’. The policeman let Kent out of the cruiser and said ‘wait till you hear his story.’ I just went looking for donuts and I had no idea this was going to transpire.
5. Learn from your mistakes
It made me realize, I have a terrible sense of direction and look at all the trouble this caused. I remember the girls in the back of the camper, peering out the back window, their little faces were so worried, so sad and concerned and they were only 3 and 5 years old. This lesson has stayed with me. Now, whenever I go anywhere, even movies, because sometimes I come out of a movie I forget where my car is, I always need landmarks and signposts to know where I am. Especially when traveling, pay attention, know the street names, tell someone if you’re lost. Now we have GPS, and I’ve traveled all over New England using a GPS to visit friends and such, and it always gets me there. The problem is, it’s happened a few times, and now I have a charger in my car, but what if you don’t have power? To be lost is not a comfortable feeling. When traveling it’s frightening.
Sharon Seifert — “I gave up and regretted it, even today”
“I got married very young, maybe around 20 years old, and I was playing Pro-Am Tennis,” where she met her ex-husband who she agreed to marry, though she notes that today, she “would never do it” but did because it was one of those things that at the time “sounds fun.” Seifert found her passion early on in Marine Biology. She signed up for a program in Massachusetts at a Marine Biology Center and was offered a 3-month research opportunity. Her husband, however, “started to rumble about, ‘how can you be gone for so long?” and that it’s “not fair to go away like that.” Despite Seifert’s independence and passion for Marine Biology, she “let him win that battle and changed majors.” Still, Seifert feels regret since she loves, “the oceans and the fish and the wildfire that’s there... I love seeing how the oceans are being affected, and the conservation of animals and creatures who live in the ocean is very important to me.” She went on to become a financial advisor, which was “rewarding of sorts, but now what I wanted.” Still, her “heart was in research.” If she could give advice to her younger self, it would be to “do what you want. Don’t let anyone tell you what you want to study, whether that’s your parents or your boyfriend” to just be “true to yourself and don’t let anyone talk you out of it… if you get older, you’re going to have regrets… even if you’ve given up or are disappointed, there are things that can make you feel okay.”
Jon Culbertson — “In an 18 month period, there were four tragic occurrences culminating in my son’s death.”
- Vehicular Homicide
I was coming home from windsurfing and I ran into a woman who drove in front. It wasn’t my fault, she was on drugs for lung cancer and dying anyway but that hastened that event. I called 911 and she was lifted out in the helicopter and didn’t even make it to the hospital, her lungs were crushed.
2. Windsurfing
I almost died myself, I was out windsurfing, and hypothermia set in. I crawled on the board and I was thinking, ‘If I’m going to die, this is a good way to go.’ I recovered quickly.
3. Partner
I had my own gymnastics facility in Florida, and my partner wound up incarcerated for… messing with the girls on the team. I was just coaching boys gymnastics. He’s still in jail but that was a heavy hit.
4. Son
My son died, he was out here in San Francisco, we had his funeral and scattered his ashes in the bay. He had issues, he didn’t really have a perfect life or upbringing. But the most devastating part of his disappearance was the fact that he was finally beginning to get his act together. He died at age 38 when a man should be in his prime. He had been in trouble with the law before and spent a year away in the St. Francis Home for Boys, a foster home in the West Coast of Florida. He had a troubled life but was very brilliant. He belonged in a challenging intellectual environment, but like a lot of troubled people, he was pretty emotional. He got into drugs and drank a lot, and I had to haul him out of the police department more than once. He moved out to San Francisco to be near his sister and he still has his problems but he had a really good IT job and it looked like things were really turning around. But, he hadn’t kicked drugs enough, I think that’s what killed him. He had an accident in his home, an accidental fall. He had beautiful golden brown eyes and always had an affinity for the sea.
I was always Type A personality, and I had a busy, rich, and full life as a result. But I was so busy and had so many responsibilities. But I never let any of the four events overtake me. I’m someone who looks at the glass as half full. You have to look at the big picture, and say ‘what a great life, all the things I’ve been able to do, carry on, don’t dwell on the past, just take responsibility… You can never get over something if you consider yourself a victim of something all the time. Instead, what can I learn and how can I carry on? It does no good to dwell on things in the past, it’s no good for you or for anybody else.
Despite all this, I’m a happy curmudgeon, I’m happy about 90% of the time.
Carol Angel — “My father was like a ghost in my childhood.”
As a child, when I was around 5, I lived in a small town in Indiana. My father was the only doctor in town for miles and miles. Me, my older brother who was seven, my younger sister who was three, my mom and my dad all went on a family vacation to the Smoky Mountains in North Carolina. It was very beautiful in the mountains and we had a wonderful time. It was the only family vacation we had taken. On the way home, in the blink of an eye, a drunk driver came down a hill and hit us head-on. I don’t remember the accident itself, but I remember after. Being in a house, some prominent family in a small town had taken us in. They told me that my dad was in the hospital and that he was ok. We were staying with the family until my father could leave the hospital.
Then, we were on a train going back to Indiana.
I kept thinking, ‘where’s my daddy?’ ‘where is he?’ and I kept hearing he was still in the hospital in North Carolina. After a while, I just stopped asking. At some point, my brother who was seven or eight, took me into the closet and told me our daddy had died and he was never coming back.
I wasn’t really shocked, a lot of time had passed. A big problem was that my mother was emotionally checked out when he died. She disappeared emotionally, she just couldn’t deal with his death. She was suddenly a young widow with three kids and little money. When there was any fighting, she would just fall apart.
Every trace of him was erased from the house. No photos, no one talked about him. I never went to a funeral, but there was one. I read his obituary as an adult but I knew almost nothing about him. Later, I learned he really was the ‘center of the town’ and the governor of Indiana came and planted a tree at the school in his honor.
As a teenager, I was angry at her, I felt abandoned… like she kept me from knowing who my dad was. I grew up without a father and without a mother figure. Eventually I came to a place where I wasn’t angry and understood what it must’ve been like and I forgave her. But even in her old age, she still couldn’t talk about him. My sister and I would ask questions and she didn’t want to talk about it. After she died, my sister and I divided up the love letters he wrote her, she had boxes of these in the attic.
Someone decided kids needed to be protected, now they deal with death differently, and it’s a difficult thing to deal with, but that wasn’t the way to do it. I’ve done some hospice and grief work for others, but children understand more than we think and protecting and shielding them isn’t always a good idea. It’s better to support them and show they’re still loved and have people who care about them instead of pretending it didn’t happen.
It’s painful going through it, when you don’t understand why you feel the way you do or what caused it, but you come out stronger.
Through hardship, struggle, pain, and confusion, people grow. The universal experience of change is constant, yet it is never easy. These five seniors have shown in their own lives that they have rebounded from moments of hardship and found the clarity and understanding their younger selves lacked. They learned from the changes in their lives and adapt. Young, old, it makes no difference. Disappearances mark abrupt changes in life. It may be painful, but these setbacks don’t only lead to sadness. There can be happiness. There can be strength found. Though it may take days, months, or years, there is always time to learn and recover.
