A 100-year-old amnesiac got married without understanding – You can’t divorce without a period of consideration – 2024-10-01 03:53:37

In February, a man with dementia, who will turn 100 years old in a couple of months, married a woman about 30 years younger than him. They were married by a representative of the Digital and Population Information Agency, despite the fact that the elderly person had already been under financial guardianship until July 2023, and extended guardianship was applied for.

An elderly person living in a nursing home arrived at the event in a veteran’s taxi without his relatives or friends and dressed casually. Those who participated in the civil ceremony were acquaintances of the approximately 70-year-old bride.

The marriage was soon forgotten

The Marriage Act requires that the celebrant assess whether there are prerequisites for marriage, i.e. whether he can marry the couple. The law states that “the wedding may not be performed if the wedding ceremony is known to prevent the marriage, or if the wedding ceremony states that the betrothed partner is obviously unable to understand the meaning of the marriage due to his disturbed state of mind”.

In the case of the old man, the consecrator apparently judged that everything was in order and performed the consecration. However, soon after that, the old man neither knew nor remembered that he was married. The man’s son heard the great news in the nursing home a couple of days later.

– The nurse told me that Faija has got married, Ville68, says. He does not appear in the story with his real name to protect his father’s privacy.

The situation was made grimmer by the fact that at the same time as the marriage took place, an application was made for extended guardianship of the elderly. Because it’s a slow process, a district judge granted a temporary order of extended guardianship less than two weeks after the ordination.

The bank was worried

Iltalehti reported for the first time about the situation of an elderly person from Helsinki already in April of last year. The man’s relatives had long suspected that the elderly man was a victim of financial abuse.

The veteran was still living at home when the name of a woman working as an entrepreneur began to repeat itself in his speeches. The woman took the man all the way to Lapland to her relatives, but did not want to meet the man’s relatives. The old man began to distance himself from his son, and believed that he was needlessly suspicious of the motives of the Helsinki entrepreneur.

Ville took care of his father’s financial affairs as agreed and noticed strange payment transactions in the account, even though his father did not spend a lot of money in his day-to-day life. Ville understood the seriousness of the situation when the bank contacted him. Concern had arisen in the bank because a woman unknown to them wanted to come to the branch to discuss an elderly person’s 250,000 euro pension insurance. In addition, cash withdrawals of thousands of euros and several payments attracted the bank’s attention.

Divorced or widowed?

In April, the Helsinki district court ordered a general trustee for the elderly to deal with matters concerning the person, the meaning of which he is unable to understand.

Lawyer, leading trustee Panu Karhu applied for a divorce for the elderly the very next day, primarily without a half-year cooling-off period. The District Court of Helsinki had ordered that the general trustee’s jurisdiction also includes filing for divorce, if he considers that the marriage was entered into for the purpose of exploitation.

Karhu justified his application by saying that the couple had never lived together. According to the law, the grounds for divorce without a cooling-off period can be that the couple has lived apart for two years.

Karhu also justified the demand by the fact that the elderly man “had been seduced into marriage without him actually understanding what he was doing and had in any case forgotten about it soon after the wedding”.

Karhu also stated that a divorce without a consideration period would protect the basic and human rights of the elderly. If an elderly person who has reached the age of 100 dies before the divorce takes effect, his right to obtain a divorce cannot be realized.

In addition, the union would leave a widow, which could have surprising and inappropriate consequences, according to the leading trustee’s assessment. “This end result would presumably not correspond to the healthy will of the elderly person, but on the contrary would be injurious to his interest and his immediate family,” Karhu reasoned.

The woman who married an old man entered into her last marriage in July 2020. The husband died at the age of 99, just less than three months after the wedding. The couple did not have a prenuptial agreement, and the woman inherited a childless man’s apartment in a very prestigious area of ​​Helsinki. The woman and her current husband have a prenuptial agreement.

– I think the woman is now wealthier than my father, Ville estimates.

He is surprised by the fact that until about a year ago, the woman was of the opinion that Ville’s father was sharp-headed, and the lawyer assisting the woman was of the same opinion. With the help of a lawyer, the woman repeatedly applied for more time for the statement of extended guardianship and even tried to get the elderly person out of the service home. Since then, the woman had second thoughts and initiated the divorce on her own. He, too, wanted a divorce without a cooling-off period.

Qualified union for consideration

The Helsinki district court rejected the application for resignation without a consideration period. However, the court considered that the trustee has brought out important and related special features, which in themselves supported the granting of resignation without a consideration period.

However, the applicants’ interpretation of the wording of the law did not correspond to the purpose of the law in the opinion of the district court. It stated that the purpose of enacting the law was to secure marriage and the permanence of marriages, when in the past the search for the culprit was abandoned, among other things.

The district court stated that the matter was unambiguous. According to the Marriage Act, the celebrant must make sure that the person to be celebrant understands the meaning of marriage. If the marriage has been concluded as required by law, it is valid.

The district court rejected the application, which was based on living apart. The couple got married in February and filed for divorce in April, meaning that the married couple had not lived apart for at least two years before filing for divorce. On that basis, a divorce cannot be granted without a consideration period, the district court stated.

The Helsinki Court of Appeal did not grant the case permission for further proceedings, which means that the district court’s decision remained permanent.

It has been difficult for Ville to go through his father’s romance, which included many phases, and not least because Ville has been suffering from cancer at the same time.

– It’s really relieved when this situation is over, he says, although one can’t help but wonder about the district court’s decision.

The resignation consideration period ends in November.

– Faija is happy in the nursing home and doesn’t remember anything about his wife. Physically, his strength has decreased, but he still walks, and we have a good relationship, says Ville.

He sees one bright side even in the fact that the father’s soon-to-be ex-wife prolonged the divorce process in many ways.

– He has not been able to remarry for the last half year.