"For David Shenk, the most important of the "windows onto meaning" afforded by Alzheimer's is its slowing down of death. Shenk likens the disease to a prism that refracts death into a spectrum of its otherwise tightly conjoined parts--death of autonomy, death of memory, death of self-consciousness, death of personality, death of body--and he subscribes to the most common trope of Alzheimer's: that its particular sadness and horror stem from the sufferer's loss of his or her "self" long before the body dies."