Son’s Five-Year Search for Missing Alzheimer’s Father in Val-de-Marne Reaches Breaking Point

"I’ve reached the end of my abilities. I realized that I was putting myself in danger. I wasn’t sleeping anymore, I wasn’t eating anymore, I wasn’t working anymore. I closed my company three years ago," Hisham tells the newspaper Le Parisien. Before his disappearance from his apartment in Champigny, this 78-year-old father showed signs of Alzheimer’s disease.

Publication of thousands of posters, sending messages on all social media... Hisham has done everything to find his father. Without success. He even had to deal with pranksters, "people of good faith but not at all physiognomists" or even scammers. "It was just before winter, he recalls. People called me from Morocco. They told me they knew where your father was. He was supposed to be with a family. But I obviously had to grease the palm of this family. In short, I had to send them money..."

In despair, he recently sent a message on his Facebook page, in which he addresses his father. "Yes dad, humans are strange, they are selfish, self-centered and cruel, but fortunately, they are good most of the time," he writes. Even if his searches have so far been unsuccessful, they have nonetheless allowed him to better know his father. "I found myself in places where he could have lived. I received other photos of him. He belongs to that generation of immigrants who were not very communicative. When I talk about it now at family meals, a lot of people are stuck," Hisham confides.

He is now less involved in the search. He is taking action towards the National Assembly so that the search is finally coordinated, the same source reports. Still, he can’t mourn. "I can’t do it. I live with the idea that you shouldn’t have regrets," he says.