I once researched a girl who disappeared from a street corner in Los Angeles in 1953. Her family in Nebraska never gave up looking for her. In 2014 the missing girl was an old lady, dying in a cancer ward of a hospital near Boston. She asked her BFF to be sure to put her parents full names and her exact place of birth in her obituary; which surprised the BFF because she had always been told her friend was an orphan from birth. Nevertheless, she did, and it took exactly 48 holurs for the first family member to hear the news she had been found. The family asked me to find out why she disappeared and how she did it. I reported back to them on the how first. At age 18 she had no money, but she took off walking toward the bus station, begging people's spare change along the way. By the time she got there, she had the money to cover a "nationwide 30 day unlimited bus pass" and had enough left in pocket to pay for meals. She got on in Los Angeles and got off in Boston. She had no money, no clothes except the ones one her back and no id, but she had given herself a new name and checked into a women's shelter where they got her back on her feet and into a secretarial school. Her application for a Social Security card was brilliant! Not one word of it was true, but it had sincerity written all over. She got a job in engineering, eventually married an engineer, and partnered with him to open their own business. They prospered. She never had chiklren, but she mothered the BFF's kids so much that, one by one, they wrote to me and asked me not to reveal anyting that would hurt her. The only sad part was telling the family the why. At age 18, she just didn't like the way her life was going and didn't think she could change it with her parents and several older sisters helicoptering. She apparently felt that the only way she could do it was alone. The only way I could think to explain it was "suicide by disappearance". Cases like it are very rare, but it does happen.