December 5, 2014

Walking Gus with Jules in the dim morning light, when suddenly I pull her up short with a major catch in my voice. "What's the matter, honey?" she says, now seeing that I am on the verge of tears. "It's OK," I say before letting loose with a torrent of half-sentences & not quite disconnected words that adds up to this: Once when I heard people say they reacted to being seriously ill by gaining the ability to appreciate every day as a gift, my response would have been to call bullshit.

As we make what passes for a dash across Main St, I add that I would've responded to such talk with a sneer: "Does anyone really wake up every morning and give thanks for the gift of a new day?" Yet I finally admit that ever since I got this thing, I have been saying when I walk Gus at noon, "Any day I can walk and talk is a good one," and it seems as though I've gained the ability to live in the moment in a way I did not before. She doesn't disagree as we cross the chiropractor's parking lot and start up the hill toward the park.

In fact, "Yes," she says, "My patients say things like that all the time. I had one guy tell me the other day that his chronic illness saved his life." Even as I reply that I don't know what kind of fool needs to get what he has to save his life, I realize that I am exactly that kind of fool. "Let's go home," I tell Gus as is my custom when we reach the corner by the park.

Once upon a time I had to rely on the whims of my heart to give me what I called "peak moments," times of spontaneous, unheralded joy when it would seem as though literally "All was right with the world." Now it's as simple as waking to a new day, and giving thanks, going outside and walking beneath the blue vault of heaven with my trusty canine companion and realizing that I have all I need in that moment, or sitting here keeping this diary saying, Thank you, thank you, thank you.

I know, it sounds pretty wonderful. I wish the cost weren't this crushing fatigue that makes each trip up the steps an adventure, but if that's the tariff, it's not an unreasonable price to pay, and in fact, those #threewalksadaywhetherIneedthemornot seem to help slow, if not halt, the progression of the disease. I don't miss the ability to run my mouth effortlessly too awful much, and this diary is proof that the loss of my handwriting comes to nothing finally. So let me repeat what I told Jules as I took a deep breath of the chill morning air and pulled myself together: as crazy as it seems, Parkinson's Disease may have been the best thing that ever happened to me.