Here’s a great 1st person account of living with Parkinson’s disease and adapting to all the changes. The writer, Abbot Gleason, was a history professor at Brown and a tennis enthusiast. He wrote this article about ten years after his initial symptoms.
I like many things about the piece. For example, it covers lots of bases: the early physical signs that he was getting PD; his reaction to the eventual diagnosis; the changes it forced in his career; the discoveries he made about growing older and about life in general. The scope is sweeping yet the details are sharply drawn. And for some reason his honesty stuns me.
Here’s one of my favorite paragraphs:
I was certainly onto something long ago when I signed on to the academy [i.e., when he made higher ed his career]. I needed an education, and I got it by learning how to help educate others. I needed to discover how many ways there are of being intelligent, how many ways of being open to the world. I learned that it is better to teach your students how to show what they can do than to demonstrate to them what you can do. I learned how deeply and intricately success and failure are related to each other and not the polar opposites I had assumed they were when I was young.
It’s paradoxical, isn’t it?, that something as “down” as Parkinson’s disease results in a stellar piece of writing such as this.
Yes it is marvelous and strange that horrible diseases like Parkinson’s end up adding “startling ” works of literary merit to the canon , but is it really worth it when you think about the pain and heartbreak. And suffering. And loss.