Even now, I feel uneasy when I gather facts about Alzheimer's. Reading, for example, David Shenk's book TheForgetting: Alzheimer's: Portrait of an Epidemic, I'm reminded that when my father got lost in his own neighborhood, or forgot to flush the toilet, he was exhibiting symptoms identical to those of millions of other afflicted people. There can be comfort in having company like this, but I'm sorry to see the personal signifcance drained from certain mistakes of myfather's, like his confusion of my mother with her mother, which struck me at the time as singular and orphic, and from which I gleaned all manner of important new insights into my parents' marriage. My sense of private selfhood turns out to have been illusory.