In the final days of her husband's life, as he lay dying from Lewy body dementia, Julianne Schultz faced an agonising choice. The world outside was reeling from a violent antisemitic massacre at Bondi Beach, just streets away from their Sydney home. Yet, inside, she made a conscious decision to shield Ian Reinecke from the news.
A Final Question and a Protective Lie
Days before his peaceful passing on Christmas Day, Ian looked at his wife of nearly five decades and asked, "Is there anything going on in the world I need to know about?" For a couple whose life together had been built on intense discussion of global and local affairs, the question cut deep. The air had been thick with the sound of helicopters and sirens all week, a palpable tension that even a fading consciousness could sense.
"No, nothing," Schultz replied, maintaining a calm she did not feel. She instructed his carers to keep the television off and avoid the subject. The place they had walked to together for years, where Ian had found joy in nature and people, had been violently desecrated. She could not bear for him to know.
2025: A Year the World Felt Unhinged
The assault at Bondi felt like a culminating tragedy in a year that, to Schultz, seemed defined by a collective loss of reason. Watching the PBS News Hour provided a brief respite from hospital television, but the reports were relentlessly grim. The dismantling of American democracy, the devastation in Gaza and Ukraine, climate disasters, and the rise of autocrats created a sense of global powerlessness.
Schultz reflects that the post-war world order born with VE Day—a month after Ian's birth—which had prioritised peace, prosperity, and human rights, appeared to be crumbling. "It was as if in 2025 the cosmos had dementia," she writes, drawing a powerful parallel to her husband's condition. Memory of past lessons vanished, actions became disinhibited, and old mistakes were repeated by vengeful figures.
The Parallels of Dementia and a Diseased World
Her husband's experience with Lewy body dementia was not a simple narrative of memory loss. It was a complex, individual disease where some faculties remained while others disintegrated. Ian once brilliantly subverted a standard cognitive test, drawing a perfect Apple Watch face instead of a clock, demonstrating the brain's ingenious capacity for workarounds.
This, Schultz suggests, holds a lesson for the world's current crises. "The worst excesses of human nature cannot be eradicated, like a disease we cannot yet cure. But with civic determination and good government they can be treated and managed," she asserts. Just as Ian's neurologist emphasised that dementia, while incurable, could be treated—granting them several more good years—so too can societal ills be addressed.
She points to signs of hope: mass protests, electoral endorsements of progressive governments, and the sea of flowers left at Bondi Pavilion. The message, drawn from the depths of personal and global despair, is one of stubborn optimism. It is a call not to retreat in the face of chaos, but to engage with diligent determination, treating the maladies of our time with the same care we would afford a loved one.
