Book draws attention to dilemma of elderly missing persons

Across the globe thousands of elderly people go missing every year. Often confused or suffering from Alzheimer’s, these older missing people wander away from their caregivers, putting themselves at risk due to delicate health and age itself, and leaving their families with worry and a race against time.

Clive Parisi, the main character in Georgiann Baldino’s latest book The Nursing Home Fugitive, suffers a stroke that robs him of his short-term memory. He walks away from the nursing home, and his fretful stepdaughter, Arlene, drops everything to find him.

But The Nursing Home Fugitive is a positive look at this situation, where both Clive and Arlene make some essential discoveries about each other and life.

Baldino began writing the book when her husband’s grandmother faced her final illness. Faced with the realities of the nursing home and the diminished capacity of her family member, she wrote a positive book of a human being’s final journey. “By wrapping life’s challenges in humorous and thoughtful language I hope to make difficulties easier to face,” she explains. “Stories help and stories heal in ways that should be shared. My hope is that patients and their caregivers will use the book to facilitate discussion. By asking each other how they feel about what Clive did, they might find it easier to talk frankly about their own choices and how they would like to face them.”

Smink Works Books publisher Suzanne Male says the book is a beautifully written, compelling and engaging story. “The novel is one of those rare reading experiences that provokes not just laughter and tears, but thought as well,” she says.

The Nursing Home Fugitive is now available in e-book format
Read or download the first chapter of the book
Read about Georgiann Baldino