Reflection
It’s after 7 AM when the new day’s sunlight hits the shallow Frio River, which outlines a portion of Bittersweet Lane. This majestic place in the Texas Hill Country is owned by dear family friends, and they have invited my family and me to join them for a few days while our children are on Spring Break.
Sitting on the front porch of their small guest house with a warm cup of coffee in hand, the cool March breeze blows and wakes brushy hilltops lying at a short distance across the river. A bird coos as the tranquil setting invites my reflection.
Pandemic
It’s been exactly one year since COVID-19’s destruction spread so quickly across the world; when life as we knew it abruptly changed. Seemingly overnight, human faces largely disappeared, as did human touch in the form of handshakes and hugs among colleagues and friends. For children and adults, friendships at once became more “socially distanced” and quickly morphed into smaller units we called “pods” or “bubbles.” Work and school moved entirely online for many people, and after the school year ended, plans for summer travels and adventures faded away, as did the freedom to move about in one’s town or city and places to shop, which required business owners to adapt to no-contact transactions and curbside delivery.
We faced these and many more changes—losses, really.
Of course, chief among these has been the loss of lives. In the United States alone, more than 500,000 of the over 29 million people infected have died from COVID-related illness—matching what we lost in WWII and the Vietnam and Korean wars combined—and it’s not over. [1] We have lost more than many of us could have imagined.
Equally surprising has been what we have gained. I would never minimize the devastating losses of COVID-19, and especially the loss of life. Still, sitting on the front porch looking at those hills, I am keenly aware of the pandemic bringing about several things that have actually enriched my life. I have in mind unanticipated gifts such as quality time with my spouse and children; a slower life pace and the emotional space to think and be creative; occasions to reflect on my priorities, especially those relating to how I spend my time and resources; opportunities to hone a vision for living more intentionally; seeing more clearly how privileged I am; and reaffirming my duty to live in service to those who have less privilege. There’s a line in a Gwendolyn Brooks poem that reads, “You are the beautiful half of a golden hurt.” [2] This line captures some of the pandemic’s surprises for me.
Illness
Living with Parkinson’s disease can also teach you a lot about experiences that are “the beautiful half of a golden hurt,” that is, simultaneously full of profound losses and surprising, invaluable gains.
For me, the gains are tied foremost to the people Parkinson’s has put into my life: the doctors and therapists who treat my illness; the generous folks who lead Parkinson’s organizations of which I have been fortunate to become a part; the scores of sisters and brothers who live with this wretched disease with copious amounts grace and grit, courage and commitment, hope and joy; and the multitude of friends, colleagues, neighbors, and even strangers who, in ways large and small, encourage my kindred and me to keep up the fight, to live well, to take one day at a time, and, with our efforts, to do something good and try to tame the Parkinson’s beast.
Among its many lessons, I am learning from Parkinson’s that life itself is a lot like this illness. Looking out at the Frio River winding through the Texas Hill Country, it occurs to me that, for all of us, whether living with a progressive illness or not, life unfolds in ways we do not expect, its surprises both pleasant and harsh. It brings good days and difficult ones. It offers moments of joy and pain, successes and failures. It entails dreams that come true and those that get quashed. It provides occasions for deep satisfaction and weighty regret. It includes gifts that give you goosebumps and losses that break your heart.
Wellbeing
We assume we cannot at once lose and gain in the same experience, especially when our health is involved. We tend to spit off and absolutize categories of experience such as illness and wellbeing, assuming they are incommensurable states. If one is ill, the thinking goes, then one cannot also be well.
However, as philosopher Havi Carel points out, illness and wellness can in fact go together. She notes that in our fears about becoming ill we neglect to consider the opportunities it presents for learning to live well, and perhaps better, because of illness, which includes things such as finding new meaning in life, reassessing personal values, resetting priorities, becoming more intentional in one’s most significant relationships, accepting what one can control and what must be left alone, and perhaps most important, valuing life in the present moment.
It is as if we live on Bittersweet Lane—all of us—amid lots of beautiful halves to golden hurts.
__________
[1] https://www.usnews.com/news/health-news/articles/2021-02-22/vaccine-efforts-redoubled-as-us-death-toll-draws-near-500k
[2] Gwendolyn Brooks, “To Be In Love.”
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 10 books on a range of topics related to bereavement, anxiety, and spirituality. His latest book is Counseling Persons with Parkinson’s Disease (Oxford University Press). His next book, 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.