Lost: One brother and lots of common sense

Published Feb. 12, 2007

We lost my husband’s brother.
Now, there are a lot of ways to lose someone.
You can lose someone at a crowded mall.
“Now, where is he? He was just behind us.”
You can lose someone on the highway.
“Speed up; I think I see his car way up there.”
You can lose someone – who has the tickets – at a Browns game.
“Now what do I do? Gimme a beer please.”
Or you can “lose” someone in the most final way. To the great beyond.
Well, we didn’t lose my brother-in-law to the great beyond, unless you consider New Jersey the great beyond. If you have ever been there, you know how it would be easy to mix up the two.
This man, my husband’s younger brother, who was a fire inspector and a volunteer firefighter in central New Jersey, has vanished off the face of the earth.
His phone has been disconnected. He has moved out of his apartment. He has no driver’s license or vehicle registered with the state of New Jersey.
We started looking for him about a month ago. His mother -- whose letters and phone calls he stopped answering nearly 10 years ago – is gravely ill. We thought he should know.
I called the police. I called his workplace. I called his firefighter “family.” No one knows where he is. And, I was starting to get the feeling that even if they knew, they couldn’t tell me.
I tried the state’s Social Security office and was told that they would send him a letter – that is, if the address they have for him is a good one -- telling him we were trying to reach him but that is all they would do.
We have been stymied over and over by privacy laws or people’s fear of what would happen to them if they violated privacy laws.
Yes, I know the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution guarantees our right to be left alone.
But, come on. I don’t want to search or seize anything. I just want to talk to my brother-in-law about his sick mother.
I was in a department store this week when I overheard one clerk tell another, “Did I tell you we finally found my father’s sister?”
My ears perked up. “You found someone who was lost?” I asked him.
“We’ve been looking and looking for my husband’s brother,” I told him. “How did you do it?”
He told me about how he used the Internet to find out where she was living and then it was just a matter of looking up her phone number – which was listed.
My dilemma isn’t quite that easy to resolve.
I walked across the store with the clerk who was helping me, the clerk who had been addressed by the successful private-eye clerk.
I told her my story.
And then she told me hers.
Her husband died in December after years of suffering from asbestos poisoning. She needed to tell her 37-year-old son but she didn’t know where he was.
He moved away three years ago and she has not heard from him since.
Wow. How many people can’t find members of their family? In this one department store on this one afternoon, there were three of us.
Is it that easy to disappear? If so, why don’t people with $100,000 in credit card debt just take off and not leave a forwarding address?
Oh, now I get it. The government can always find you. Your mother or your brother have no right to know where you are, but commit a crime and have an arrest warrant out on you and you better believe you’ll be found.
Somehow, I can’t believe that’s exactly what our Founding Fathers had in mind when they wrote that Bill of Rights all those years ago.