In the notice that we had run in local newspapers nine months earlier, my mother insisted that we say my fatherhad died "after long illness." She liked the phrase's formality and reticence, but it was hard not to hear her grievance in it as well, her emphasis on long. The pathologist's identification of senile plaques in my father's brain served to confirm,as only an autopsy could, the fact with which she'd struggled daily for many year: like millions of other Americans, my father had had Alzheimer's disease.This was his disease. It was also, you could argue, his story. But you have to let me tell it.