Family losing hope week after Dutch woman's (73) disappearance in France
It has been just over a week since 73-year-old Marjan Roozendaal disappeared from a campsite in Vacquières in the south of France. The Dutch woman has Alzheimer’s, and her family are getting increasingly desperate to find her. “All scenarios are bad scenarios,” her daughter, Brenda Mol, told NOS.
Marjan was visiting a friend who has a home at the Parc Le Duc campsite. She was on her way to the swimming pool when she disappeared. “She knew her way around the campsite. She had already walked back and forth to the swimming pool a few times,” Mol said. “But camera images show her walking away from the campsite, lost in thought. She walked passed the barriers. You see her pause for a moment and look around in despair. Then it seems af she makes a decision and walks straight ahead.”
Mol went to the campsite immediately. “It is important to be there yourself; you have to be on top of it; otherwise, people will stop looking,” she said. The French police called off their search on Tuesday after their sniffer dogs couldn’t pick up Marjan’s trail anymore. Her family asked the Dutch Rescue Dog Foundation RHWW to come help, and they’ve been searching since the weekend, interrupted by storms on Sunday.
Mol is “totally in survival mode,” she told NOS. She tries to help by making sure the searchers are cared for. “Then you also have something to do.” Her mind is playing all kinds of scenarios, “but all scenarios are bad scenarios.”
“For example, if she is found somewhere in a city or village, she has gone through a very stressful period in which she is lost in a place where she doesn’t speak the language,” Mol said about her mother. “That can be traumatic and cause a huge decline.” And that is the best-case scenario. She could also have gotten lost in nature. “That happens a lot in this area. Then her chance of survival is not very good after seven days.”
Mol says she talked to her mother about whether it was wise to go on holiday, given her health and early Azlheimer’s diagnosis. But it was important to her. “She liked being among people.” Marjan was functioning “fairly well,” although her short-term memory wasn’t optimal. “And it was safe in a park with a friend. What could happen?”
She thinks the new environment confused her mother more than she already was. “She had many resources in her own environment, which made her come across better.” Mol last spoke to her mother on FaceTime on the day she went missing. “I saw then that she was having a hard time with all the new strange people.”
