Memory and The Nature of Time

On 19 June 2003, I received an email from Brazil. It was from an intellectual lady who had read some of the articles that I had published on my web site. She was a civil servant who was qualified in language, literature and law, She had a significant position in the Brazilian Federal Court system.

I was living in the UK at that time. I had been unemployed for 12 years and I was totally burned out. I had no future in the UK. After corresponding with my Brazilian friend over the following 6 months, she invited me to visit Brazil. I was desperate to get out of my stagnant situation in the UK. I needed a breath of fresh air. So on 31 December 2003, I went to Brazil for a fortnight, all paid for by my Brazilian friend.

She arranged the fortnight as leave from her work and took me on trips to various places in Brazil. During this time, we discussed subjects of mutual interest, covering many areas including the physical and social sciences, philosophy, morality and justice. At the end of that fortnight, my friend said that if I were to emigrate to Brazil, she would support me economically in the pursuit of my writing and web publishing. I accepted, saying that I would have to return to the UK for about six months to put my affairs in order.

Thus, on 23 June 2004, I boarded an aircraft for Brazil with the clothes I stood up in, what was packed in my 88 litre Bergen on my back, my laptop computer on my shoulder and £500 in my pocket. I arrived in Brazil on 24 June 2004. Over the following months, my friend showed me around her city [which has a current population of just under 5 million people] and introduced me to her relatives, friends and colleagues at the Federal Court where she worked. I quickly emerged from the bad psychological state I had in the UK and developed a new life-mission of observing, thinking and writing about our subjects of mutual interest.

Progress of Onset of Alzheimers During the next 9 years, we pursued a fairly fixed routine. We attended a gym each morning, after which we discussed our ideas concerning my writing. She then went to work from 1 pm to 9pm. I stayed in our apartment to research and write articles. During her annual leave she took me to many places throughout Brazil, with foreign trips to meet with my friends and relatives in the UK, Canada, Switzerland & Portugal. Everything was fine with us and I felt satisfyingly productive with my writing.

Then, in mid 2013, she began to feel somewhat estranged at work. It arose because one junior colleague had suggested to the Court administrator that she thought that my friend was showing signs of Alzheimer's disease. This incensed us both. So we went to a neurology clinic where she had a series of brain scans and conversational examinations with an old and very experienced neurologist. He wrote an official declaration that there was absolutely nothing wrong with her. She felt vindicated and that perhaps her colleague had had ulterior motives, connected with the allocation of work bonuses, for saying what she did.

Notwithstanding, over the next 3 years, that something was not quite right became increasingly apparent. It seems she was gradually persuaded that it was time to retire, which she did in late 2016.

This was not a bad thing: she had worked solidly for 44 years. Nobody from the Court ever said anything directly to me. However, I gather — reading between the lines — that she was doing things like replacing case files in any random slot within the vast case archive. Anyway, I liked the idea of her retiring. More time together to do and travel.

Our Trip to Gdansk

I was not aware of any concrete abnormality until 2019 when, from 25 June to 10 July, we made a long trip to Gdansk via Lisbon and Berlin. The first incident was when we arrived in Berlin from Lisbon. We were dining on the open pavement in front of a restaurant with 4 other people when my friend thought she was in her home city in Brazil. She said she wanted to take a taxi to quickly visit her mother to check that she was all right. It was obvious that we were not in her home city. The taxis were different. The streets were different. The people were mostly speaking German. I somehow calmed her. Half an hour later she had reverted to normality.

She saw Berlin but thought it was her home city. She was clearly having a hallucination in which she was seeing one city but perceiving it as a very different-looking city.

The remainder of the time in Berlin and throughout the whole trip to Gdansk and back to Berlin she was reasonably normal. However, while we were waiting for our long haul flight to Brazil at Lisbon airport, she had another enormous hallucination. She was convinced that Lisbon airport was a large shopping mall she knew in her home city. This is despite the fact that large intercontinental aircraft were visible through the windows parked at the gates. Again, she was clearly hallucinating.

We had already passed through the boarding security checks and were waiting airside ready to embark. She told me to wait while she went to the toilet. Then, I saw her in the distance heading for the exit from airside. I quickly ran and caught her in time before she passed to ground side. She said she wanted just to take a taxi to see her mother. Obviously she thought she was in her home city in Brazil. This really stressed me. We boarded our flight and 9 hours later arrived back in Brazil.

From all this, it is apparent that she had become very susceptible to random confusion concerning place or location. During the following years, this spatial confusion manifested itself in other ways. Though we have lived in our apartment for over 18 years, she is never sure whether or not all of it is ours. She thinks that different parts of it, such as the veranda or the bedrooms, belong to other people. At night, she nearly always assumes that we are sleeping in a temporary abode that is not ours, such as a hotel or an accommodation that belongs to somebody else. Often, in the late evening, she asks if we are going to sleep 'here' or if we need to go 'back'. She is never specific about where 'back' is. If I ask, she becomes confused. When she wakes up during the night for the toilet, she almost always has to ask me the way to the bathroom.

Other Hallucinations

The first time she said something strange that caused me concern was when we visited Canada between the 29 July and the 12 August 2013. We were with relatives George and Geneviève in a restaurant in Montreal talking normally. Suddenly she aggressively said "You can't stand by side of me because you're a direitista [on the political right]" It was completely out of context and completely wrong. She knows perfectly well that I'm not a direitista. As we left the restaurant, Geneviève looked at us and, with a worried face, she asked if everything was okay.

It didn't register with me at the time, but earlier in 2019, she had related at length an incident that occurred in our local neighbourhood. It was an assault [armed robbery] at the local lotérica [functional equivalent of a sub-post office]. She related how there was a great tumult and confusion with large numbers of police involved. I had assumed it was true. However, her nephew perceived that it wasn't. It was a hallucination. About a year later, she commented to one of the staff at the lotérica about the assault. He was perplexed and said that he did not know anything about it. And he worked there every day, Monday to Saturday.

Although we have one small dog [a Maltese terrier] she became convinced that there are two similar dogs in the house of our neighbours, which also belong to her and that the neighbours confiscated them from her. Some times she says she bought the other dogs. Other times she says she encountered them as strays in the street. She has been round to the neighbour's house to demand the return of the dogs. I don't think she was aggressive with them but she talks very aggressively and with anger regarding the neighbour's alleged action in confiscating her dogs. She has even tried to involve me in helping her scale the neighbour's wall to retrieve the dogs while the neighbours were away.

She also has on-going illusions that appear to be somewhat esoteric. She talks of a vast multitude of people ascending a great incline onto a higher plane. I am never sure whether this is simply a steady climb up to a physical plateau or whether it is an ascension to a higher spiritual plane. Among those ascending are her mother and her nephew. She describes the place where these people are going as a beautiful place where people have well designed ideal homes. There is a related hallucination in which her nephew lives in a mansion there belonging to a rich woman. He is tasked with caring for her 4 sons. She often substitutes my daughter for her nephew in this story. She frequently talks, with conviction, about other events and situations regarding family members, which could not possibly have occurred.

Happily, after about mid 2024, these rather weird illusions seemed to subside to be replaced by what I can best describe as exaggerated concerns.

The most prominent of these concerns is that her mother is seriously ill. There is nothing wrong with her mother's health. This started in late September 2024 with her pestering me to let her out of the apartment to go alone to see her mother because, she said, her mother had a serious health problem. I couldn't let her go by herself because she wouldn't know where to go even though her mother lives only about 200 metres down the same street. This happened again in mid October. I took her to see her mother and she saw that her mother was well. Again, in early December she would not settle down and got up at 11 o'clock at night wanting to go immediately to see her mother whom she said had a serious health problem. I had to sleep in the spare room in order to get some peace. This exaggerated concern about her mother seems to be on-going. She has tried many times to escape into the street to go on her own to see her mother. One time she managed to get as far as the front stairs of the apartment building, where I caught her before she went out of the front gate.

She has also fallen under an illusion that her nephew [whom she brought up herself as a son] is seriously ill or in some kind of trouble. This concern surfaces only rarely.

There are, however, two illusions that seem to persist in the long term but that are nonetheless reasonably benign. The first is about an imaginary rapas [lad, in Portuguese] who frequently comes to our apartment to do various jobs and who is also a well known member of the wider local community. However, her descriptions of him and his activities is nebulous to say the least. The second persistent illusion is that she spends hours talking to people in her vast collection of photographs of family and friends. She scolds them when they don't respond to her conversations. I think she perceives the people in the photographs to be real.

She Knew

Over the 3 or 4 years following the Gdansk trip, she developed ominous symptoms that led me and her family to suspect that everything was far from well. I think she also knew that something was not right with her. This was evinced by something she did in late 2019.

She would go to the bank once a week and withdraw an enormous amount of cash. She gave half to me and half to her mother. It was a lot of money. All I could do with it was to store it in a folder in my filing cabinet. I said to her that I felt rather insecure with all this cash in the apartment. She replied that I needed it because I was a lot more vulnerable than she was. She said that if anything happened to her, then I would be in a dangerous situation. From a financial point of view, she was of course correct. Eventually I persuaded her to stop withdrawing the money, which she did. I gradually spent the cash over the following year on shopping.

Her mother apparently gave all the money she had received to false charity callers: bikers who apparently queued up at the other side of the block from her mother's apartment, each one calling on her in turn at 5 minute intervals, giving her time to forget completely about the previous one. She had old age dementia. Neighbours eventually called the police to put a stop to this despicable exploitation of a vulnerable old lady.

Other Symptoms

On Monday 10 August 2020 she had an attack of intense dizziness. This was followed by other attacks. These occurred at any time without warning, even while in bed. On some occasions it was necessary to take her to hospital. At other times an attack was so severe that it was necessary to call for an ambulance. The attending medics, in every case, thought that the cause was the balance crystals in her labyrinth having moved out of place. She always veered leftwards when walking blindfolded. They gave her a battery of exercises, which she followed rigorously, to re-train her brain to account for the shifted positions of the crystals. Eventually, after about two years, these dizziness spells all but ceased.

Then in late 2020, she developed her second severe symptom: tinnitus. She experienced almost constant sound in her right ear. She described it at times as a hissing sound and at other times as a female voice. The voice is mostly a sound. It does not say any discernable words as experienced by a person with schizophrenia. She has no physical pain or discomfort in her ear, other than the noise. More recently the voice sometimes says discernable words but is mostly unintelligible, like a chuntering radio. She was given a rigorous auditory examination, which verified that there was nothing wrong with her auditory system.

The tinnitus, however, could have been precipitated by the absurd injurous level of noise from heavy machinery vibrating the whole superstructure of the building where we live, which began on 06 August 2020. This was the latest of the intense noise that we have to endure due to the almost continuous remodelling of apartments. I also suffered from sleep-depriving tinnitus at this time, which persisted for over 6 months. The noise level in our apartment was ludicrous. For her, the tinnitus persisted for a year — until six months after the re-building work in the adjacent apartment had finished.

Change in Behaviour

Formerly, throughout her life, she was athletic. She always did regular physical exercise and followed a lifestyle that supposedly would protect one from Alzheimer's disease. She was also intellectual. She qualified in languages, literature and law and had a career as a Federal Judicial Analyst. She read a lot on a wide range of subjects such as the social, political and physical sciences. Now she has lost interest in all of these and fills her day doing unnecessary mundane tasks like picking fluff off the dog's bed covers and watching boring television shows.

She has always been very careful as regards traffic and crossing the road. Recently, however, she has walked straight in front of a car, the driver of which had to brake hard to avoid running over her. Each time she has seemed oblivious to the situation. She used to be so careful with conservation and economy. However, she now never turns a light off and spends ages with the water running just to rinse a cup.

I conjecture that the universe isn't conscious and has no memory. Consequently, nature is not concerned with amounts of energy and volumes of water, but only with their rates of dissipation or flow. Thus, nature doesn't switch off the sun or a water fall when not in use. The energy and water keep flowing. Natural processes are concerned only with rates of flow; not total energy expended or volume of water used. Hence, anybody without a memory sees things more the way nature does; namely as rates, not quantities. This is probably why a person with Alzheimer is unmindful about switching off a light or turning off a tap. It is only because humans have memory that their economic administrations meter things by energy expended and volume used, in order to conform to their largely dysfunctional and unnatural notion of monetary charging.

It is extremely difficult for me to understand her apparently psychopathic insistence on feeding the dog with food that is bad for it and could easily result in its early death. These are foods that the veterinary and all credible sources of advice say that one should never give to a dog, especially a small breed like our Maltese. I repeatedly tell her every time I see her doing it. Her brother and nephew repeatedly tell her. But she ignores totally what we say. In fact, she'll feed these things to the dog immediately [only seconds] after it has been yet again explained to her why she should not do so. She places this food in saucers which she distributes around the apartment — in the kitchen, the lounge, the veranda and in the bedrooms. It is difficult to avoid kicking or stepping into a saucer of the bad food she puts for the dog when walking around the apartment.

Is this a result of forgetting, even after only a few seconds? Is it bloody-mindedness, which is uncharacteristic of her? Or is it total dissociation between what is said to her and what she does? Or has she developed multiple personalities? When I confront her with a saucer of fudge or yogurt that she has given to the dog, she says she did not do it. She says this in a way that convinces me that she really believes it, saying that some 'vagabond' must have come into the apartment and given this stuff to the dog. This behaviour seems to be permanent: set in concrete. There's no apparent way to persuade her to change.

On more than one occasion she has tried to eat a frozen piece of chicken taken straight from the freezer, complaining that it was so hard, because she has 'had nothing to eat all day'. In fact, she had Neston+granola and coffee for breakfast, mamão and coffee for elevenses, soy mince greens and pasta stew for lunch, cheese and creamed potato mince-meat bake for evening dinner.

By far the most disruptive and work-creating change in behaviour is her propensity for getting something from its proper place, using it, then, when she has finished using it, putting it just anywhere. She doesn't merely put it down somewhere: she puts it away in a totally irrational place. For instance, I have found my toothbrush in the kitchen cutlery drawer, my toothpaste in the kitchen storage cupboard and the dog's water dish in the tea towel drawer. When she or anybody else needs to use that thing the next time, it cannot be found. One would literally need a thorough police-style search of the entire house to find it. There is no apparent logic to determine where she would put it. When questioned about this behaviour, she says that a thief obviously entered our house and stole it, but that it wasn't her.

There are other new more benign and non-disruptive changes in behaviour such as always now sleeping in her day clothes, and getting up in the early hours and wanting breakfast. The sheer amount of extra work this behaviour precipitates is an unwelcome burden on me. To convey some sense of this, I have written a summary of the relevant events of the year 2024.

Loss of Memory

This is the most distressing and disruptive symptom of all. It became rapidly obvious that she couldn't remember such things as the day of the week, the day of the month, the current month or even the current year. She could no longer recall family phone numbers she has known for decades. She frequently asks for these to be repeated after as little as 3 minutes. Recently she came across my surname in one of her notebooks. She asked me whose surname this was. At times, she even asks me if Robert [that's me] is in the apartment.

When in bed during the night, she always now has to ask me the way to the bathroom and I have to take her there. She no longer remembers many commonly used words. For instance, she has forgotten the word for knickers but uses other words and phrases very adeptly to describe what she is referring to. She will also select the wrong word, such as referring to a red object as green.

She couldn't remember how long it had been since I arrived in Brazil. I've been here 19 years but she has the impression that it's only 2 or 3 years. I have visited her small birth city 7 times over the past 19 years but she thinks I have never been there. She now thinks she first met me in Gdansk in 2019 and that I came from there with her to Brazil. In fact we made initial contact by email in June 2003 and met in January 2004 and I came to Brazil permanently in June 2004. She thinks she met my daughter first in 2012 at a marathon run around a lake in her home city.

From this, it is apparent that she has also become very susceptible to random confusion concerning time; specifically, a contracted perception of periods of time. It appears to me that her memory of the past is fracturing, with most becoming lost or otherwise inaccessible. Only certain fragments remain intact but can become re-located in time, transposed or even superimposed one upon another. For example, at the original time of writing, she does not recall current events for more than 5 minutes. We visited her mother, after which we descended to the street from her mother's apartment. Less than one block down the street she had forgotten that she had seen her mother 5 minutes before. At this time of editing, the span of her memory has reduced to about 10 to 15 seconds. Yet, all the while, her intelligence has remained just as sharp as ever.

It seems to me that she now lives in a continuum of the present. This is a very difficult notion to grasp, especially for somebody like me who suffers from an overly persistent memory. My only way to visualise it — which may or may not be a correct one — is to think of memory in the simple terms of the separate frames of a movie. Under current technology, motion pictures, television broadcasts and video streaming systems produce a frame about once every 42 milliseconds. That is a rate of 24 frames per second. However, my analogy must portray a continuum of time. Consequently, the period of separation between consecutive 'frames' must tend towards zero. This is equivalent to saying that the 'frame rate' [the number of frames per second] must tend towards infinity.

Inset: Here lies a paradox. My friend frequently sings and engages in the vocal percussion of Latin-American rhythms. Music only exists in time. It requires a sense of an extent of time to contain its sequence of musical notes. This requires a memory that can capture the full extent of each phrase of the melody. Of course, music does travel through space and its tones are shaped by a spatial environment like a concert hall. Nevertheless, neither melodies nor rhythms are spatial phenomena. The paradox is that the temporal phrases of melody and rhythm exceed the current 10-second extent of her immediate memory. How is this possible?

In this 'infinite frame-rate' analogy, I imagine most people's memories to be like the 'final cut' of a movie. All the sub-standard or irrelevant clips have been redacted. My somewhat autistic memory contains a lot of very old clips that I wish I could edit out. At the other extreme, I think a person with advanced Alzheimer's must have an elongated time-frame with an infinitely thin high-definition front surface that gradually fuzzes out over a few minutes as it recedes into the past.

The ideal is for a person to remember events that are important and forget events that are not important. Pivotal or life-changing events are important. Mundane or repeated trivial events are not important to remember as individual happenings but perhaps they should be remembered as a kind of amalgam. Traumatic or damaging events will make a deep imprint in the memory. However, where such events were a one-off or are no longer relevant in that they are unlikely to happen again, they should become forgotten. Events through which universal principles are revealed, or whereby significant lessons are learned, should be forever recallable. Thus, if the brain embodies an algorithm — or some kind of complex-dynamical equivalent — that determines if and to what degree an event is remembered, it must indeed be very large and intricate.

Hence, the rate at which — and the degree to which — one's memory fades needs to be regulated by the brain. Memory that fades too rapidly and too much [as with Alzheimer's disease] is bad. Memory that persists too long and does not forget sufficiently [as with Autism] is also bad. The memory's rate and degree of fading needs to be somewhere in the middle; forgetting what it is not beneficial to remember and remembering what is beneficial to be able to recall. Notwithstanding, the past — and hence our notion of an extent or period of time — can exist only within and by virtue of the human memory accommodated by the human brain. It is not part of — and has no counter-part or analogy within — the external physical universe.

Yet, if some phenomenon, originating from the outside universe, were not continually impinging upon our senses, we would be fundamentally unable to experience what we call time or lay down memories. The concepts of birth, growth, senility and death could not be constructed: they would be without meaning. Notions of past and future would also have no meaning.

But that phenomenon is not the time that we measure in years, months, days, hours, minutes and seconds. I perceive events as information-bearing experiences that continually arrive at the seat of my consciousness. To me, it is as if they are inscriptions etched upon some kind of medium that is somehow converging towards me, at a constant radial velocity, from every direction in space. I speculate that this velocity is 'c', the speed of light.

Consequently, I think that time itself is the rate of flow 'r' of this fundamental medium or æther. What I perceive as a period of time 't' is a distance 'd' [which is measured radially outwards into the sphere of space that is my personal event horizon] divided by 'c'. Thus, the universe exists in a continuously changing present: there is no past or future.

This is the basis for a universal theory that I have expounded more from the point of view of the physical sciences in my series of articles about the universe.

Furthermore, through mindful consideration, I perceive that what I am currently experiencing — what I am aware of as a sentient being — is that continuously flowing present: and only that continuously flowing present. I am fundamentally unable to consciously experience a period of time. Consequently, my conscious mind would appear to be like the universe. It exists only within a continuously flowing present, which has the character of an elongated time-frame with an infinitely thin high-definition front surface that gradually fuzzes out over a few minutes [or even only a few seconds] as it recedes into the past.

Of course, behind the scenes, some kind of mechanism is recording my experiences as memories within my physical brain. My conscious mind can then, from time to time, capture and consider a past memory as it is thrown up spontaneously, from my subconscious, into my conscious view. But there, even if it be a memory that covers a long period of time, I can mindfully consider it only within the continuously flowing present of my consciousness.

Inset: This may offer a clue for answering my question above as to how it is possible for my friend's dexterity with song and rhythm still to be intact. It gives credence to the idea that, although the conscious mind affects, and is affected by, brain activity, the conscious mind is not itself exclusively a manifestation of brain activity. The conscious mind must therefore be a phenomenon whose substance and functionality reside essentially outside of the brain's 86 billion-neuron bio-physical network. So, though the brain may deteriorate, the conscious mind's functionality, within the jurisdiction of its continuous present, does not.

Clearly, memory has empowered humanity to create something that is beyond and superior to the physical universe. The physical universe is merely a catalyst that facilitates the construction, within our memories, of this greater creation. Sadly, those with Alzheimer's disease lose ever more of their internal creation. That is, unless our memories are elsewhere preserved intact.

As a final note on my friend's memory as a sufferer from Alzheimer's disease, things are not quite as cut and dried as I have described above. It seems that whereas, for the most part, at this stage, her brain is unable to lay down new memories, there are still some kinds of things she can learn. This is evinced by a situation resulting from her blocking the toilets in our apartment. She had blocked the toilet irreparably in our suite bathroom. To clear it, I will eventually have to disassemble the toilet, remove it from the floor and clear it from the sewer end.

To avoid her forgetting and so using the toilet inadvertently, I locked the suite bathroom from the outside and hid the key. Over the succeeding months, she tried the door many times and found it locked. I had to explain every time why it was locked. Over time, she gradually stopped trying to open the door to that bathroom. I therefore unlocked the door. She never tries that door any more. Her brain had obviously learned the fact that the suite bathroom is a non-entity for the purpose of going to the toilet.

Observation: It seems, therefore, that she can still learn things that do not involve words or language. She can still learn what works and what doesn't in a purely physical way. So it would appear that Alzheimer's disease affects the functionality of the brain that requires linguistic or logical processing but not so much the functionality that builds pure procedure.

Her Susceptibility

Her physical and intellectual pursuits and her adherence to good diet should all have contributed to protecting her against such a disease. Yet she fell victim to it. The only factor in her life that is listed as increasing susceptibility to Alzheimer's is her very early menopause at the age of 35, although she did take conjugated oestrogen's [Premarin] as a menopausal hormone therapy for many years following her menopause.

Medical Examinations

Her brothers, a nephew and I all realised that she needed to be examined medically regarding the symptoms and events we had observed in her. We arranged for a neurologist to produce a magnetic resonance scan of her brain and a detailed electroencephalograph. The neurologist was emphatic: both examinations showed that there was nothing wrong with her brain. He said that the MRI showed that her brain condition was better than average for her age. At the post-examination consultation, her nephew questioned the neurologist about the severe symptoms we had observed. The neurologist replied rather irritatedly, "Look, who is the medic here? I say there is absolutely nothing wrong with her".

She felt vindicated by the neurologist's declaration that there was absolutely nothing wrong with her. She had a growing anger with people [originally her work colleagues, and now especially her brother], who were trying to help her with her memory problem. She accused them of trying to 'deconstruct' her. This anger was uncharacteristic of her.

But the remainder of us were nonplussed. On the next routine consultation with her cardiologist, I told him about the neurological examinations. She was taking medication to reduce cholesterol prescribed by her cardiologist. He knew that the brain needs cholesterol to form memories and that perhaps, as a result of this medication, the brain was being starved of sufficient cholesterol. So he suspended the cholesterol-reducing medication for 3 months to see if there was an improvement in her memory. There wasn't. So that medication was resumed. Another possibility was a blockage in the carotid arteries that supply blood to the brain. She had an ultrasound image taken of the carotid arteries. There was no blockage.

It seemed that all the options for physical causes had been investigated. We therefore arranged for her to have a neuropsychological evaluation. She passed all cognitive and memory tests well. The examining psychologist too declared that there was nothing wrong with her, except that perhaps she was lacking mindfulness: she perhaps did not pay sufficient attention to what she was doing. The psychologist prescribed exercises in mindfulness and deliberate intellectual pursuits. We were still completely nonplussed.

Approaching despair, I made another appointment for her to see her cardiologist. He diplomatically suggested that we seek a consultation with a geriatrician.

We found a geriatrician and her nephew made an appointment for her on 07 Jul 2021. On 11 Jul 2021, her nephew emailed me saying that the geriatrician had said that she had second [middle] stage Alzheimer's disease. On 20 Jul 2021 she had another consultation with the geriatrician. On 04 Aug 2021 the geriatrician officially diagnosed her with Alzheimer's disease.

Unfortunately, we were unable to access the on-line official diagnosis document because we were unable to pass the security check on the medical website through which the official document was released. So we couldn't use 04 Aug 2021 as the official date of her diagnosis.

The geriatrician issued another formal diagnosis on 25 July 2022 [only 10 days short of a year later] that she was in Stage 2 of Alzheimer's disease. He advised that, in her particular case, we should not mention to her the name of the disease.

Consequences

I was told that, as a result of her diagnosis, she would become eligible for exemption from having to pay income tax. On 11 Aug 2022, she was interviewed by three medics to verify her condition. From this, she was granted exemption from having to pay income tax.

Her diagnosis stated that, as a result of her condition, she was no longer able to manage her property, administrate her finances or exercise her civil rights. She would therefore need somebody else to do these things on her behalf. As her life companion, this obligation naturally fell to me in the first instance. I felt very sad and uncomfortable about it. However, on 03 January 2023, I contacted our lawyer and asked him to conduct the process that would give me power of attorney for her.

We were warned by several people that this process would take a long time. It took almost seven months for me to receive the formal document granting me power of attorney. However, this document only granted me provisional authority and expired after 6 months. To date, Wed 26 Feb 2025, the provisional authority has long expired and [after over 2 years since initiating the process] I have still not received full official power of attorney.

Conclusion

My dear friend is in no way to blame for her condition. It is not her fault. She has lived her life in every respect in a way that all mainstream thought on the subject asserts to be the way that will best avoid the possibility of developing such a disease. She should therefore be loved and respected by everybody as she well deserves. She should not have to suffer any stigma or disrespect, subjugation or side-lining as a result of her disease or thought of in any way as a lesser person.

Her situation naturally makes me very sad. However, on the positive side, she does seem to be genuinely happy and her condition has inadvertently bequeathed to me an insight — whether or not it be truly consistent with reality — about what I now perceive to be the nature of time. ¶