Art & Parkinson’s
Grief & Acceptance
The Beast
I had an image the other day – a flash of seeing the beast up close, in a three-way Hal/Carol/Beast embrace. It wasn’t scary, like you would think. More comforting. Helping us prepare for what comes next. We walked into the woods together, the three of us side by side. I realized that at some point, the beast will probably continue down the path with Hal and I will have to turn around and walk back through the woods on my own.
The Most Fun
Every Sunday morning, Hal and I have a date where we spend an hour together in bed.
I don’t always look forward to these hours. My endless to-do-list is sometimes calling louder, my brain looking for the satisfaction of checking off the items. But our time together is a commitment and so I show up.
We shift from one position to another, painfully slowly on his part. Sometimes he gets stuck on all fours and I have to grab a leg and pull. We feel the warmth of flesh-on-flesh. And we talk about all kinds of things: Our latest preoccupations, the indignities of Parkinson’s, of aging, our changing attitudes towards what feels like this all-too-quick approach-of-the-end, how we’re dealing with it, what enables us to get through the day.
And somewhere along the line, humor is injected – sometimes at the beginning, sometimes in the middle, sometimes close to the end. But we almost always end up at one point in tears-running-down-our-faces belly-laughing. Playing with words, ideas, feelings – Hal’s humor lifting us up and over the waves that threaten us.