Cliff
“There should be a rule that you only get one thing!” My friend Cliff makes this statement as we visit by Zoom. Late in the evening, he has hat head and three- or four- day gray stubble. His lament comes from a vulnerable place—one of anxiety and fear, existential angst, and both physical and emotional fatigue.
His Parkinson’s symptoms with a COVID-19 overlay are significant.
Cliff learned a few days earlier of his positive COVID test results, and as he strains almost incessantly to discern how he became infected—“I was so careful”—and with whom he might have come into contact—“I hope I didn’t give it to anyone”—an insidious virus gripping much of the world is in a standoff with his body.
New to club PD, Cliff received a Parkinson’s diagnosis just a couple of months ago. As many of us do, he bobs up and down in a rough sea of symptoms, working as hard as he can to figure out how to calm them, how to live with them: hour by hour, day by day. Now, he has COVID-19, too—an unexpected gale force storm to ride out.
“I know,” I say. “Parkinson’s alone is all-consuming.”
Mitch and Curly
Later that night, as I thought more about our conversation, and especially of Cliff’s comment—There should be a rule that you only get one thing—I remembered a scene in a 1991 movie titled City Slickers. It starred Billy Crystal, who plays Mitch Robbins, and Jack Palance, a rugged, seasoned cowboy named Curly. Fending-off threats of a midlife crisis, Mitch and his two friends, all of them urbanites, embark on a two-week cattle drive from New Mexico to Colorado, where they meet Curly. On a break from lassoing errant cattle, he confronts Mitch with an existential question.
“Do you know what the secret of life is?” Curly asks.
Silence.
Holding up one finger, Curly says, “This. One thing. Just one thing. You stick to that and the rest don’t mean sh#%.”
“But what’s the ‘one thing’,” asks Mitch.
Smiling, Curly says, “That’s what you have to figure out.”
Us
Like Curly, Parkinson’s has an uncanny ability to lasso and pull you into a new reflective space, and there it beckons you to figure things out. Many questions linger and lure you toward hoping, if not believing, that all you have to do is discover that one thing—that which, when figured out, offers up, once and for all, the answer to the questions that take up residence in both your conscious and unconscious mind from the moment you get the diagnosis. Live questions. Pressing questions. Questions having to do with one thing—namely, how do I live with this illness?
Of course, many questions live within this larger question. Questions of meaning, values and purpose; of priorities, passions, and hope. Medical questions, relationship questions, insurance questions, financial questions, parenting questions…the list goes on.
So fundamentally human, our answers, even if provisional, point to something we must need in order to keep weathering Parkinson’s storms, and to keep searching, if not for the secret of life, then for something that can help us with the key to living well, and meaningfully, and with joy.
Evidently, what Parkinson’s, COVID-19, and midlife crises share, at least in my free-associating brain, is that they put before us enduring questions, many of which relate to personal values, priorities, passions, and goals—to what we most want and need.
Which gets us back to what we have to figure out, our one thing—how we live with this illness, and how we can stick to our tenacious commitment to rise each day empowered by this one thing, so that the rest of PD don’t mean sh#%.
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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. His latest book, on counseling people with Parkinson’s disease, will be published by Oxford University Press in 2021. Follow him on Twitter @PDWise.