by Rider, Tanya
Support groups are also an important resource as they help you connect with organizations full of people in your position. Some members of support groups have positive stories of how their loved one returned home, while others are still on the hunt for theirs. Either way, members of support groups have been where you are. They know what you are experiencing. They can also give you ideas and leads to help you get the word out about your missing loved one and, together, you can help each other to do everything possible to bring your loved one home.
In addition to mental health professionals and emotional support, medical doctors should be included in your self-care effort. Especially if you have a loss of appetite and sleep, it is important that you check in with your doctor. Stress and anxiety about the safe return of your loved one can bring you down and result in further ailments.
No matter what your circumstances, remember: You are not alone. The following organizations can help to connect you with other people in your area who are struggling with similar issues. They can also direct you to local resources and help you find professionals who can help you.
National Support Resources
Association of Missing and Exploited Children’s Organization (AMECO)
703-838-8379 | Toll Free: 877-263-2620
www.amecoinc.org
[email protected]
An organization of member organizations that provides prevention programs and educational materials.
Community United Effort (CUE) Center For Missing Persons
910-343-1131 / 910-232-1687
www.ncmissingpersons.org
Support services include individual/group grief counseling and assistance to meet family’s personal needs.
Let’s Bring Them Home
National Center for Missing Adults Support Group
Bentonville, AR
Corporate Headquarters: 479-871-1059
www.theyaremissed.org/ncma
National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC)
www.missingkids.com
Assists victims of abduction/exploitation and helps their families and caregivers.
One Missing Link (OML)
Springfield, MO
800-555-7037 or 417-886-5836
www.onemissinglink.org
Facilitates networking between agencies and assists families with counseling, emotional support.
Operation Lookout: National Center for Missing Youth
Hotline: 1-800-LOOKOUT (800-566-5688)
www.operationlookout.org
[email protected]
Search assistance and family/victim support services.
Project Jason
Phone: 402-932-0095
www.projectjason.org
[email protected]
Case assessment, resources, and support for families of the missing.
Trinity Search and Recovery
925-918-3669
www.trinitysearch.org
[email protected]
Remembering Someone Who is Missing
The website for the organization Let’s Bring Them Home/The National Center for Missing Adults provides helpful ideas for ways families can deal with the trauma of having a loved one disappear. The organization suggests that people can work on continuing to feel close to their missing loved one. To this end, the website provides a list of fifty suggestions for ways you can continue your relationship with your missing loved one.2
1. Say your loved one’s name out loud and don’t be afraid to talk about him or her
2. Keep photos around
3. Write a letter
4. Turn your porch light on at night, until your missing loved one returns
5. Plan an event such as a candlelight vigil, memorial, or balloon release
6. Occasionally eat their favorite food
7. Imagine having a conversation with your missing loved one
8. Say prayers
9. Visit their favorite spot
10. Donate to your loved one’s favorite charity
11. Volunteer at your loved one’s favorite charity
12. Sometimes when a new building is being erected, you can personalize a brick with your loved one’s name
13. Share favorite memories with other family members, especially young children who may not remember the missing person well
14. Create a memory box with a photo, favorite cologne/perfume, piece of clothing, favorite book, and other things that remind you of your loved one
15. Occasionally look through the memory box you’ve created for your missing loved one
16. Plant flowers or a garden
17. Make a tile or tile wall with your loved one’s name and put it in your garden
18. At holidays, birthdays, or other special occasions, give a memento to other family members such as a hat, a shirt, watch, earrings, or a framed photo
19. Keep a diary or journal
20. Paint a picture of your loved one
21. Call other family members or friends of the loved one on their birthday, holidays, or annual date of disappearance
22. Send flowers to another family member on special days
23. Create a new tradition or ritual such as lighting candles every day, week, or month
24. Fly a kite with a special message to your loved one attached
25. Listen to your loved one’s favorite song or album
26. Plant a tree and put ribbons on it with family and friends’ names and special messages
27. Play your missing loved one’s favorite board or video game
28. Create a scrapbook with photos, ticket stubs, poems, letters, and other special items
29. Dedicate a park bench to your missing loved one
30. Make a special ornament or decoration for the holidays with your loved one’s name
31. Draw a picture of your loved one
32. Have a celebration for your loved one and invite friends and family to talk about their favorite moments with the missing person
33. Name a star after your missing loved one; they may be looking up at it too
34. Sing a song
35. Write a poem
36. Send balloons to another family member on special days
37. Wear a missing loved one’s shirt, hat, or other piece of clothing
38. At holidays and other special occasions, leave an empty chair for the person
39. Make a quilt using scraps of your missing loved one’s blankets or clothing
40. Display a special box on your missing loved one’s birthday, annual date of disappearance, and holidays and have family and friends fill it with notes.
41. Play your missing loved one’s favorite sport
42. Wear a pin with a photo of your missing loved one
43. Read your missing loved one’s favorite book or story
44. Continue your missing loved one’s favorite tradition
45. Have a calendar made with photos of your missing loved one
46. Follow a rainbow to see if your missing loved one is on the other side
47. Wear clothing with your loved one’s favorite color
48. Donate your loved one’s favorite book to a library
49. Create a website dedicated to your missing loved one
50. Release a balloon with a special message to your missing loved one
CHAPTER FOUR
What If YOU Are the One Who Is Missing?
It can happen to anybody. You’re on the way home from work when your car goes off the road, hidden from other vehicles. You might be alone, trapped, even seriously injured. You will almost certainly be scared. And, worse, you could be stranded for hours or days before someone finds you. What do you do?
And what if you are abducted—grabbed by someone who throws you into the trunk of their car, or chains you to their steering column? What can you do? The best way to survive such an emergency is to be prepared for whatever might happen to you.
Be Prepared
In a car, your survival odds are best when you’ve prepared for possible emergencies so you have a plan of action and basic tools to support your survival and rescue. With the introduction of technological innovations, motorists have a decisive advantage. Vehicle assistance programs like OnStar can alert authorities that a person needs help, and GPS units can guide you out of dangerous situations, help you figure out where you are if you are lost, and may be able to set off an alarm. But you never know when a high-tech gadget will malfunction or lose power, so low-tech and no-tech tools are also extremely important and valuable. A good, old-fashioned map, for example, could save your life.
Motorists should equip their cars with emergency kits, carried in the trunk at all times. Your emergency kit should include:
• A map of the area in which you are driving;
• A charged cell phone and mobile charger;
• Emergency supplies;
• Drinking water to last for several days;
• High-calorie snacks like candy bars, nuts, energy bars, etc.
• Spare blankets and extra clothing in cold weather; hat and long-sleeved lightweight clothing in hot weather;
• A standard first-aid kit;
• A flashlight with extra batteries;
• A candle, matches and flares.
Of course, your cell phone might be the most important survival tool you own. Every time you get in your vehicle, be sure your phone is well charged. Keep a mobile charger in your car in case your phone’s battery runs low.
While driving, be aware of your surroundings. Take note of public places and emergency call boxes along the roadside because, even if you have a cell phone, you might need to find a call box. If you drive out of range of cell service, your phone loses power, or your phone is lost or damaged in a crash, you will be grateful if you know which direction to walk for a call box or other aid.
If you get lost in a rough neighborhood, you are always safer if you remain inside your vehicle. Keep your cell phone handy and lock your doors. Try to retrace your path but also try to stay in populated, well lit areas where people—witnesses—can see you.
If your vehicle is disabled, remain inside, keep your car locked with the windows up, and use your cell phone to call for help. If you are in danger in an urban area or someone is threatening you, lay on the horn to attract attention and call 911; “smart phones” are equipped to transmit digital information about your location so that a dispatcher can determine your location and send the police to help you. If for some reason your cell phone does not work, pretend it does. Look at the person who is threatening you and talk into your cell phone—whether it is connected to another person or not—while you pretend to describe the assailant to the police. Predators have no way to know if you really are on the phone or not, so this may deter them from victimizing you.
Surviving in Your Car
If you have an accident or become stranded in your vehicle on a highway, in a rural area, or in any other safe neighborhood, immediately turn on your hazard lights to alert other vehicles. If you are not in a remote area, a passing car or pedestrian will likely spot your flashing lights and come to your assistance within minutes or hours.
If you have a cell phone and are able to use it, call for help. If you are without a working phone and you are able to walk, set out to find an emergency call box along the road if these are available, or toward any public business. Leave your phone on but turn off the vibration mode, which uses more battery.
The weather—cold or hot—plays a major part in what to do if you are stranded. If you are stuck in your vehicle or outside during cold weather, you must be mindful of a number of physical ailments that can set in. Even when the temperature is above freezing, hypothermia is a risk. It can be fatal. If you do not treat hypothermia soon, your body may undergo cardiac arrest or you could go into shock. Therefore, before you drive in winter conditions, it is important that you prepare by stocking your emergency kit with additional materials specifically to help prevent hypothermia. Extra blankets and warm clothing are mandatory. Also, a candle and matches are compact and extremely helpful items for a wintertime emergency kit, as you can light the candle and warm the interior of your car.
On the other hand, if you are stranded in hot weather, your primary concern will be water and keeping yourself hydrated. Tanya Rider’s eight-day survival while trapped in her car is considered a miracle. Most people cannot survive more than about three days without water, though this depends on many factors. In any case, it is easy, especially in hot weather, to become dehydrated.
Keep in mind that, in addition to losing water via elimination (urinating)
and perspiration (sweating), our bodies lose water through respiration—breathing. If you understand how you can minimize your body’s water loss, you can increase your odds of surviving in the event that you are stranded without a water supply. To reduce your water loss:
• Try not to work up a sweat, even though you must try to get to safety;
• Try not to work so strenuously that you breathe heavily, because this increases your water loss through respiration;
• Try not to panic and breathe heavily and rapidly, as you will lose more water via increased respirations;
• Try to stay as cool as possible to minimize sweating;
• Try to keep your skin out of the sun, as sunburn makes the body lose water more rapidly;
• Avoid exposure to (hot or cold)
wind, which wicks moisture away from the body;
• Eat only what you need to keep up your strength. You are better off not eating much, since the body consumes water to digest food;
• Do not consume coffee, alcohol or other diuretics—if you happen to have them with you—because they cause the body to lose water.
What if you’re stranded without a car?
First, stay calm. Stressing about your situation isn’t going to make things any better. You’ll need a clear and level mind to take in your surroundings and to consider your predicament logically and strategically. What do you see? What do you hear? What do you smell? Are you hurt? Is someone else hurt? Do you have anything that might help you—food, clothing, water, a cell phone?
After you consider your surroundings, make a plan. Contemplate whether you are better off staying put and awaiting help or physically moving out of the area. Either way, decide soon and act quickly. If you sustained any significant injuries, it is probably best to stay stationary and conserve your energy. However, if possible, move to the most visible location in your immediate area. If you believe that people are quite likely to be searching for you in the area, remain as visible as you can and stay in one place so that you are not a moving target. Unless you need to wear all of your clothes for warmth, put any bright garments or other possessions, such as a purse or backpack, out in a clearing or on a tree branch where they will be more visible to anyone who might be searching for you.
If you are caught outdoors for an extended period of time, you’ll need to consider a number of factors, such as lack of shelter, poisonous plants, limited food and water supply and the possible presence of dangerous wildlife. To survive, you’ll generally need to meet your body’s four basic needs: warmth, food, water and sleep.
Warmth. Even if you are in an area with warm daytime weather, when night falls, so does the temperature. While it is light out, try to find a shelter—an abandoned building, cave, or even dense shrubbery that you can crawl under to find some protection from the elements, especially rain. If nothing like this is available, and since weather can be unpredictable, you may need to build some sort of shelter to shield you from the elements, especially if you are caught in a rain shower or snowstorm. If it looks like you will be out overnight, try to build a shelter using foliage from the terrain.
If you do not have enough warm clothing or blankets with you, or you cannot find a shelter, you can keep yourself warm if you know any of several ways to start a fire in the wilderness. It is a good idea to study
and practice fire-building techniques before you find yourself in a life-or-death situation. Try to carry matches with you whenever you hike, travel through the country, or in any situation that could possibly leave you stranded out in the elements. It is a good idea to tightly wrap a book of matches in a plastic bag, squeezing out all the air you possibly can before you securely seal the bag with a rubber band. Then, wrap and secure the matches a second time, so that the packet is waterproof. If you are going to be away from civilization, carry this packet in your wallet, purse, backpack or pocket. Something as small and simple as a book of matches could save your life.
Water. Water is essential for life and you can only survive without it for a matter of days. But drinking dirty water can cause a number of ailments (including diarrhea, which causes more loss of hydration) so you should think about different ways to locate water and to purify it for drinking and cooking. If it rains, use a large leaf to devise a bowl so you can catch rainwater, or lay a shirt out to soak up rain and then suck the water out of the shirt. Usually, at dusk, deer and other wild animals descend to their water supplies. If you study animal-made tracks in the earth, you might be able to see animal tracks that could lead you to a natural source of water.
Food. You can survive without food for up to three weeks. However, if you are in the wilderness for an extended period of time, you will need the energy that food provides in order to work on your survival and rescue. Therefore, the most valuable thing you can do, in advance of any such emergency, is to become acquainted with the native food sources in the region in which you are traveling. Tossing a guidebook about poisonous and edible plants into your purse or backpack could save your life. Nuts and berries can provide precious calories on which you can sustain yourself. You might try to devise a weapon or build a trap so that you can hunt or trap an animal for food. If productive, this food can sustain you for an extended period of time.