Instructor to vessels of justice and healing
Fluent in words of resilience and hope
Ardently teaching for twenty years
Bidding pupils to listen and learn.
At mid-career, illness begins
Invading vessels from brain to big toes
Slowing while showing
Robbing and rewarding
Exhausting but enlivening
Confusing and clarifying.
With Parkinson’s present
I listen and learn
Professing and progressing
Teaching anew.
__________
Photo by Simon Berger on Unsplash
Allan Cole is a professor in The Steve Hicks School of Social Work at The University of Texas at Austin and, by courtesy, a professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at the Dell Medical School. Diagnosed with Parkinson’s in 2016, at the age of 48, he serves on the Board of Directors at Power for Parkinson’s, a non-profit organization that provides free exercise, dance, and singing classes for people living with Parkinson’s disease in Central Texas, and globally via instructional videos. He also serves as a Community Advocate for ParkinsonsDisease.net, and as a regular guest contributor to the Michael J. Fox Foundation’s Team Fox Blog, writing columns about living well with Parkinson’s. He is the author or editor of 12 books on a range of topics related to bereavement, anxiety, and spirituality. His latest books, Counseling Persons with Parkinson’s Disease (Oxford University Press) and Discerning the Way: Lessons from Parkinson’s Disease (Cascade), will be published in 2021. He is also working on a book of poetry titled In the Care of Plenty: Poems (Resource Publications), which will be published in 2022. Follow him on Twitter @PDWise.