This search will have stamina

The search for Raymond Horn won’t be laid to rest until he is. The formal side of it has been scaled back as must inevitably happen, and his family, overspilling with that mix of pain and gratitude that such circumstances wring out of loved ones, have acknowledged that for all the efforts to date, he is most likely deceased.

In that case there is a little patch of Invercargill where a man adrift in our midst might have settled himself down for a spell and lies there still. Or maybe he came to some particular harm. Or, though it is scarcely a hope large enough to cling to, there is a survival story all the happier for being at this stage wildly implausible.

We just don’t know and cannot until he is found.

But what thousands of searchers, from police and LandSAR personnel to a legion of local volunteers know full well is this: wherever Raymond Horn is laying his head, he does not belong there.

It is sad enough, and hard enough, when people go missing in the wilds of Fiordland or our coastal waters.

But this is a case of a frail 68-year-old stroke survivor with dementia who went missing from our very midst.

It is a case that, in more senses than one, has Invercargill looking inwards, rather than outwards.

Raymond Horn forayed from Walmsley House on February 15 and was last seen on the main boulevard through Queens Park in the early afternoon.

Given what was understood about his limited mobility, this was outside the parameters of the initial search.

Such is the purposefulness that can at times render people with dementia surprisingly intrepid.

At the behest of police and with the gratitude of his family and friends, thousands among us have searched public places and their own private property.

Invercargill has, very rarely, seen other searches of comparable scale within its close environs.

Some ended splendidly, such as the 1971 search through thick Awarua scrub for missing 4-year-old Janice Murphy. Among the many hundreds of concerned volunteers, the man who found her said she had sounded like a little lamb bleating. But, farm girl that she was, she insisted she had not really been scared.

By dismal contrast, the intense southern city search for 8-year-old Sarah Curry in 1992 ended with the discovery of her body in pine trees and long grass off the Bluff highway, close to her home. Her killer, Peter Davis, was later sentenced to preventive detention and remains in jail.

At least, whether they are joyous or desperately sad, resolutions are resolutions.

Raymond Horn’s disappearance will stay vivid in Invercargill’s collective consciousness, and perhaps its conscience.

Whatever happened to this man happened as he wandered among us, alone among who knows how many passers-by who, sadly but understandably, did not appreciate the depths of his distress.

He needs to be found.

‘‘This is a case of a frail 68-year-old stroke survivor with dementia who went missing from our very midst.’’