The fake bus stop hack

I've known three people so far with Alzheimer's: My grandmother, my grandfather, and my mother-in-law.

My observation is that Alzheimer's definitely shifts your personality, but which direction it goes in is not obvious. My grandma ended up paranoid and distrustful. My grandfather remained cheerful and smiling right up to the end. (Neither of them actually died of Alzheimer's.) My mother-in-law is also fairly far over toward the good-cheer side.

It is tempting to observe that Alzheimer's tends to exaggerate an existing aspect of your personality: My grandmother was always paranoid and became more so; my grandfather was always fairly cheerful and outgoing. But some of that may be due to environmental factors: an Alzheimer's patient surrounded by familiar, friendly people and things is naturally likely to be happier. When you've got Alzheimer's, the influence of environment gets larger and larger, since it's your only possible source of continuity. That's what this awesome bus stop hack is exploiting.

In a less interventional medicine system, my elder relatives would have been diagnosed "old age" instead of some obscure illness and left to themselves to die earlier (oh horrors!), sparing everyone and themselves from the tragedy of the mind dying and the body not dying.