For this, it is nice to know a Thai story. We were told this story from one of our teachers. It is about a teacher who had became ill from malaria. While ill, he was pretty delirious most of the time, but he continued to do most of his functions, and he would still go on what they call "pindabat," where monks go out to collect their food in order to eat. When he was going out on pindabat, in his delirium, he would hold out his bowl to people, who would put some rice or something in it, and then he would look at them and say, "Have you made the first level of enlightenment yet?."
When asked, they all said no, and he said, "Well you should work harder." And to everyone who put something into his bowl, he would ask the same thing, they would all say no, and he would tell them to work harder. This went on for two or three days.
The people of the village got very perplexed, confused, "Why is he doing this?" Then they heard that he had malaria and got delirious at times, saying things that weren't really normal to say. Then they discovered that next time he asked, if they said "yes," they had reached the first level, he would say "good" and walk away. After a couple of weeks his delirium passed, he didn't remember anything that he had said, and everything went back to normal.
The reason I give this example is that what he had trained in became predominant even though his mind was delirious. Now it is taught that whatever you have trained your mind strongly in will come up easier. And if you haven't seen it for yourself, you'd better train some more! It will come up easier! If a person is angry a lot, it will come up more easily, if a person is loving a lot, the loving comes up more easily. So although I am not an expert on Alzheimer's disease, I would hope that the stronger traits which a person develops, the development of mind qualities as written here, will come up more easily for them.
Now, interestingly enough, although I am not an expert on this, we did have a family friend who did die from Alzheimer's, or they believe it was. I had met her at the time when she started developing it, and she said that she thought having Alzheimer's would be a nicer thing than others, and she was a loving person and that was her perspective. Now I wouldn't wish it on anyone so don't get me wrong here, but the traits, the good traits will hopefully come through. Now to add to that, I'm not sure if it was a German phrase, but I have a feeling someone told me that in Germany they have some sort of saying that as a person gets older and older, their real qualities come out stronger and stronger, I don't know exactly how it went. So that's how we feel, even for a person with Alzheimer's, when they die even and people say their mind is a wreck, maybe we don't know really, and hopefully all of the good qualities will be there, maybe in a kind of confused state, but still be there.