My uncle had Alzheimers. (Get back here, I’ll be quick!) Waaaay back then it wasn’t called Alzheimers or dementia. We brushed it off as him just being silly. He would call up his brother-in-law and talk about past events as if it happened yesterday. I remember once he took a night bus to another state, but due to a comedy of errors he ended up back home. At the bus station, he called my aunt and said, “Wow, this town is totally like home! You should see it! Look, it even has the same coffee shop!” It took him a run-in with a friend to realise where he was, and it became a story we’d laugh over during family reunions. Then in 2009-2010, my aunt suddenly passed away in her sleep. My dad headed to Terengganu for the funeral (aunt was my dad’s sister). In the church, my dad...
Yesterday’s gone (and so are all the other days)
The phrase “I remember it like it was yesterday” becomes somewhat meaningless when you realise that yesterday, like every other day since the beginning of time, is gone forever – and therefore can’t be easily referred to for a quick fact-check. One of the first things they teach you when you become a copper (or so I am told) is to take eyewitness accounts with a generous helping of salt. This goes double for witnesses to an event that was both entirely unexpected and began and ended within an extremely short space of time. This can be largely explained through the concept of schematic thinking – an idea that fascinated me in sixth form psychology, and which I shall now explain to you in what is probably a mangled and misinterpreted manner so heaving with irony, it just might melt my laptop. A schema is sort of like one...