impending insanity. Those with cancer could expect to be supported by their community, Alice expected to be outcast. Even the well-intentioned and educated tended to keep a fearful distance from the mentally ill. She didn't want to become someone people avoided and feared. Accepting the fact that she did indeed have Alzheimer's, that she could only bank on two unacceptably effective drugs available to treat it, and that she couldn't trade any of this in for some other, curable disease, what did she want? Assuming the in vitro procedure worked, she wanted to live to hold Anna's baby and know it was her grandchild. She wanted to see Lydia act in something she was proud of. She wanted to see Tom fall in love. She wanted one more sab batical year with John. She wanted to read every book she could before she could no longer read. She laughed a little, surprised at what she'd just revealed to herself. Nowhere in that list was there anything about lin- guistics, teaching, or Harvard. She ate her last bite of cone. She wanted more sunny, seventy-degree days and ice-cream cones. And when the burden of her disease exceeded the pleas- ure of that ice cream, she wanted to die. But would she quite literally have the presence of mind to recognize it when those curves crossed? She worried that the future her would be incapable of remembering and executing this kind of plan. Asking John or any of her children to assist her with this in any way was not an option. She'd never put any of them in