My dad died from Parkinson’s. Not a Parkinson’s-related injury, like a fall or choking, but in his sleep Parkinson’s crept in and killed him.
Tom has gotten me hooked on Shrinking, the Harrison Ford show on Apple TV. I avoided it for ages, because the Harrison Ford character has Parkinson’s and I didn’t want to deal with that. But goddamn, this show is so well written and perfectly acted that I fell I fell in love with it and it angers me. It angers me because I don’t write that well and it angers me that now I want to live in California and it angers me because Parkinson’s stole my dad from me, piece by piece, for years before it ended.
I’m still in season one (happens when you’re both busy and want to watch together), but I’ve seen a few snippets of the most recent season. Where Harrison Ford and Michael J. Fox meet in a clinic and exclaim, “FUCK PARKINSON’S.” That…that hit so, so hard. Because when I write about this fucking disease, all I can say is FUCK PARKINSON’S. For years it’s been FUCK PARKINSON’S.
My dad died from this fucking disease three years ago today. He told us of the diagnosis in 2010, and was a major reason why we decided to move back to Illinois from Colorado in 2011. We had several great years with him before shit got serious in the fall of 2019. His blood pressure went rogue and mom couldn’t get him off the floor and had to call EMS. That was the beginning of the end.
That fucking disease stole him from us, just as it stole his mom some 25-odd years earlier.
I tried to save his brain for research, I really tried. But he died over a weekend and the brain people couldn’t get their shit together quick enough to recover the grey matter. Other stuff was recycled…ahem…donated, but not his brain. I desperately wanted his brain studied, because he was an amazing twice-exceptional man with FUCKING PARKINSON’S and it needed to be studied. I’ll go to my grave regretting that it couldn’t be saved for science.
It’s been a really rough few weeks here. My therapist was out of town last week, and today it took a solid 20 minutes just to get her caught up. At one point she thought I was finished, but no, because THEN THERE WERE ANTS. For the record, there shouldn’t be ants in the dishwasher filter when you go to wash it. The more you know!!! 💫
The ants were the six-legged frosting on the shit cake of the last few weeks. Today’s therapy takeaway? First world problems are still problems when you live in said first world. That said, a strong argument can be made that the US is not remotely a first world and that’s definitely a big part of the ant-frosted shit cake.
I lost my dad three years ago today and I miss him. I miss going to quirky food markets and little hidden bookstores with him. I miss sharing interesting science articles that I find. I miss seeing him and my mom light up a room, just by being together. I miss his quiet humor that is so much like mine. I miss him but I’m glad he’s gone because the hellscape we’re living through on the daily would have destroyed his gentle soul.
The final frontier comes for us all eventually. I just hope I leave the world in a better place, as he did.
As I’ve told you before, I think, my mom has Parkinson’s. And absolutely FUCK PARKINSONS!!!!!!!!! (With ALL the exclamation points!) Felt like crying while reading your story, missing her in advance of her being gone. Because she’s still here, but those really good years that we had after her diagnosis are behind us now. Now she is a lovely woman at an assisted living facility who all the aides adore, who struggles with remembering the sentence she started to say, getting the food into her mouth, standing and sitting and moving and living. And it’s only going to get shitty fucking worse. And I dread it all. And I’m sorry that you understand it all, but thanks for being someone who understands at all. And now I actually am crying.