I'm struck, above all, by the apparent persistence of his will. I'm powerless not to believe that he was exertingsome bodily remnant of his self-discipline, some reserve of strength in the sinews beneath both consciousness and memory, when he pulled himself together for the request he made to me outside the nursing home. I'm powerless as well not to believe that his crash on the following morning, like his crash on his furst night alone in a hospital, amounted to a relinquishment of that will, a letting-go, an embrace of madness in the face of unbearable emotion. Although we can fix the starting point of his decline (full consciousness and sanity) and the end point (oblivion and death), his brain wasn't simply a computational device running gradually and inexorably amok. Where the subtractive progress of Alzheimer's might predict a steady downward trend like this--what I saw of my father's fall looked more like this: