We’re measuring life in hours these days, and sometimes in smaller increments. I’ve been thinking about the highs and lows of some of these hours.
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The Zooming Hour
Sometimes, life dishes out disappointment. Something happens that does not match our hopes or expectations.
Like when Audrey recently defended her dissertation, the last requirement for completing her Ph.D. program in social work at The University of Texas at Austin.
It’s late morning when the eight of us meet online. Zooming in from different locations around Austin, all sheltered in place, we have anticipated this joyous occasion—some for weeks, others for months and even years. Nevertheless, with COVID-19 leaving its mark, it’s not as we’d hoped or expected.
Viewing one another through webcams, we don headsets and microphones, looking like participants on Hollywood Squares or characters on the Brady Bunch crossed with airline pilots or radio DJs.
After a few exchanges of pleasantries, Audrey’s dissertation defense begins. Leading us through her project, answering our questions, demonstrating her expertise, she flourishes, as she has throughout her program. It’s a memorable day; the culmination of rigorous doctoral studies four years in the making.
Our gathering certainly feels joyful and celebrative, but also a tad disappointing—bittersweet.
Why? Because we cannot meet in person and exchange celebratory handshakes and hugs; and Audrey will not have a graduation ceremony this spring, when her family and friends and the larger community would recognize her accomplishment; and we are living in a liminal space, anxious and unsettled, not knowing what the next days, weeks, or months will bring.
It feels like we’re shortchanging her as COVID-19 leaves its mark.
The Longing Hour
I think back to something my friend Elizabeth told me recently. Her friend is distraught over not being able to visit the nursing home where her elderly mother is cared-for. This parent lives with dementia, and her daughter worries that she will not understand the circumstances and will assume she has been abandoned.
I also hark back to when my wife Tracey told me that women giving birth in hospitals are having to do so without their birth partners by their sides—all part of social distancing and other pandemic safety measures. Do these mothers and their partners feel abandoned or shortchanged, too?
I wonder as well about other significant occasions we will lose—weddings, bat mitzvahs, birthday parties, book clubs, ball games, dance recitals—and the connections we will miss and the life experiences we will forego as we socially distance ourselves, flatten the curve of exposure to this virus, and, we hope, inch ourselves back to some measure of normalcy.
The Living Hour
As I reflect on all of this, and as I sit with the pain it causes, I remember something I learned from Robert Frost many years ago, when I was a student myself. He said, “In three words I can sum up everything I’ve learned about life: it goes on.”[1]
When our hopes and expectations go unfulfilled…life goes on.
Which brings me to those of us who live with Parkinson’s disease. We know something about hopes and expectations going unfulfilled. These disappointments come by way of physical challenges, emotional pain, relational renegotiations, professional pivots, and social distancing of another sort.
Perhaps we are left feeling shortchanged if not abandoned.
But should we expect it to be otherwise?
There’s a line in Margaret Mitchell’s classic novel, Gone with the Wind, that says, “Life’s under no obligation to give us what we expect.”[2]
In other words, life sometimes disappoints.
But it also satisfies, even amid its disappointments. This we cannot forget.
Babies still come into the world; and the frail elderly still get cared for; and hard-working students still graduate and prosper. Not only this, but those of us with Parkinson’s still love, work, laugh, cry, contribute, guide, share, nurture, embrace, give thanks, and hope.
Accordingly, life goes on.
___________
[1] Ray Josephs, “Robert Frost’s Secret,” This Week Magazine, September 1954.
[2] Margaret Mitchell, Gone with the Wind (New York: Pocket Books, 1998), 1291.
Photo by Karim MANJRA 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, professor of psychiatry in 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, writing columns about living well with Parkinson’s. He is author or editor of 10 books on a range of topics related to bereavement, anxiety, and spirituality. Currently, he is writing a book on counseling people with Parkinson’s disease, which will be published by Oxford University Press. Follow him on Twitter @PDWise