ABSTRACT
I … now see my reluctance to apply the term Alzheimer’s to my father as a way of protecting the specifi city of Earl Franzen from the generality of a named condition. Conditions have symptoms; symptoms point to the organic basis of everything we are. They point to the brain as meat. And, where I ought to recognize that, yes, the brain is meat, I seem instead to maintain a blind spot across which I then interpolate stories that emphasize the more soul-like aspects of the self.
