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Thursday, December 5, 2019

Roving Grandpa

I must say that I am super impressed with our police officers.

Our Grandpa is a roving dementia patient. This means that he has dementia but loves to wander out of doors. Since forever, Grandpa has had the habit of taking long walks. He clocks about 8 km by foot daily. These walks are very important to him. Life would not be worth living if he could not leave the house and leave behind Grandma's nagging and critical spirit. I did consider locking the gate and imprisoning him at home, but it seems like such a cruel thing to do.

So, we gave him a GPS tracker. The last 2 times he got lost, we were able to locate him quickly using the GPS tracker.

However, when he left house yesterday, he had forgotten to bring everything. He took out his sling bag with nothing inside it: no wallet, no keys, no money.

He left house at 9am.

He did not come home.

At about 6-ish, we searched for him around the house. We thought it would be quite easy since Grandpa walks very slowly and with no money, he could not have taken a bus. In the end, we had to resort to filing a Missing Person police report. Normally, the person needs to be missing for more than 24 hours before we can make a report but when the police officer saw that it was an 83 yr old with dementia, diabetes blah blah blah, they sent out the search instructions to all the patrols even before we had even started typing the report.

We were grateful for that.

It was what happened later that was impressive. Grand Aunt was at the MRT station walking home. She saw a familiar shuffling figure in the distance and caught up to it. It was Grandpa! To me, it was divine Providence. I had got people to pray for our search and the person who found him was not even searching.

I quickly called the police station so that they would not expend resources in searching for a man we had already found. Instead of merely closing the case, the SPF sent a patrol down to our home and...
- checked in on Grandpa
- investigated thoroughly the circumstances of Grandpa's disappearance
- investigated thoroughly the circumstances of Grandpa's re-appearance

Then, they sent a patrol down to Grand Aunt's place to thoroughly investigate how Grand Aunt found Grandpa.

Petunia is always very respectful of people with high standards, whether the people are hawkers or police officers or lawyers. I was impressed by how thorough the police officers were in investigating the case. I had expected that they would simply close the case when Grandpa was found. To see such dedication on their part to ensure the wellbeing of an 83 year old made me proud to be a Singaporean.

I guess the police officers found it suspicious that an 83 year old dementia patient with a limp, had made his way 6 km away from home, by foot. Quite a feat!





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