In r989, as his powers of concentration waned with his growing "nervousness & depression," my father stopped writing letters altogether. My mother and I were therefore amazed to find, in the same drawer in which he'd left thoseaddresses and birth dates, an unsent letter dated January 22, 1993 一unimaginably late, a matter of weels before his final breakdown. The letter was in an envelope addressed to mynephew Nick, who, at age six, had just begun to write letters himself. Possibly my father was ashamed to send a letter that he knew wasn't fully coherent; more likely, given the state of his hippocampal health, he simply forgot. The letter, which for me has become an emblem of invisibly heroic exertions of the will, is written in a tiny penciled script that keeps veering away from the horizontal: