IN FOCUS: What happened when an elderly man with dementia went missing for 6 days, and the lessons we can learn

Half the day had passed by the time I knocked on Mr Anjang’s front door at 2pm, but for him, the day had just begun.  

Dementia has not only affected Mr Anjang’s mental processing skills, but also his ability to keep normal sleeping hours. 

Mr Anjang’s days start past noon, but he keeps to a routine as much as he can. After prayers, the elderly man takes bread and washes that down with tea, before taking an array of medications and an injection for diabetes. 

Only then was he ready to speak to me. 

Despite his condition, Mr Anjang only needed the occasional prompt when certain words escaped him. 

He never lost sight of the interview’s objective: to explain and demonstrate how he gets around.

We took a private-hire car to a nearby Al-Ameen coffee shop, which he frequents every other week with friends. The rojak there is good, he said.

With his walking aid, Mr Anjang navigated his block’s corridor and void deck with ease, making his turns confidently as he guided me to the car park – as if the movements were muscle memory. 

In the car, the elderly man pointed out to me routes he would follow, while recounting snippets of his life, both pre- and post-diagnosis. 

Once a superintendent at a petrochemical plant, Mr Anjang’s first inkling that something was amiss was when a fire broke out at his workplace around 2007. 

In that high-pressure moment, “everything went blank”, he recounted to me. “I cannot remember anything … until they came to me for instruction, I didn’t know what to say.”  

His condition remained undiagnosed until a decade later, when his wife saw him coming out of his home toilet with a cup of coffee and asked him about it. 

“To me, (as) I saw it, the toilet was not the toilet. I saw something else,” Mr Anjang said. That moment spurred the couple to seek medical help.

Now, eight years after his diagnosis, Mr Anjang has found ways to manage his situation and has come up with a personal mantra: Move with deliberation. 

He directed the driver to the eating house at Marsiling Industrial Park. Throughout, Mr Anjang took pride in showing me just how familiar he was with the coffee shop, down to the slight kerb that separated the indoor and outdoor seating areas.

As I watched him, Mr Anjang made eye contact with me and gestured at the kerb before stepping over it. 

Like he said, every step – deliberate.