|
Gray Matter
The Right To Life
My friend Charles is struggling against Parkinson’s disease, a relentless and baffling anomaly. Sadly, there’s little I can do, other than to work harder at being his pal. I begin by offering this essay.
Charles is the ‘literary lion’ at our Geezer College, my name for Emory University’s Institute for Lifelong Learning. He teaches a course on Dickens that some call
brilliant.
During lunch recently, he slid a two-page manuscript toward me. “In its early stages, Parkinson’s is just an inconvenience,” the piece begins, “but the disease is progressive…and a debilitating disease without a cure brings no promise except more debilitating symptoms.”
The title of Charles’ melancholy reflection is: “Life at the Outer Limits.” He describes hallucinations (“The woodchuck that disappeared through my closed window got my attention…”) and then continues, “Each morning brings the possibility of a new indignity. For example, uncontrolled shaking, impaired speech, foot dragging, drooling and toppling.
“One recent symptom--difficulty swallowing--is also poised for social embarrassment, as food and spittle tend to enter the wind pipe, instead of the esophagus. People are always so polite, pretending not to notice…”
By a coincidence, I walked away from our 90-minute luncheon and that night, or the next, watched a television docu-drama on Parkinson’s, titled “Saving Milly.” I had read the book five years ago and I now returned to it, eagerly.
Written by journalist Morton Kondracke about his late wife, Millicent Martinez Kondracke, this 275-page non-fiction treatise is, truly, all about “Love, Politics, and Parkinson’s Disease,” exactly as the dust jacket promises.
Columnist Richard Cohen wrote in 2001 that Kondracke’s work was “an account of a love so huge that I shrank from it. Could I do the same?”
“Parkinson’s disease has kidnapped my wife. It is in the process of killing her,” begins husband Morton. “I hug and kiss what is left of her. We make love. But she is not who she was. She cannot walk, and now she can barely speak. She is being carried into an abyss, and I am helpless to rescue her.
“I hate Parkinson’s,” continues Kondracke. “For what it has done to my beloved and is doing to one million Americans. It is a horrible story…”
Yes, an estimated one million, the majority older than 60, know the terror and physical wreckage that is Parkinson’s. This lost tribe includes not only friend Charles but spokesperson Michael J. Fox, the Rev. Billy Graham and Muhammad Ali,
Author Konracke includes a plea to those in government, including the intractable White House where science seems to rank much below political debt or obligation. He writes: “Brain scientists say enough is known that Parkinson’s disease could be cured in five to 10 years, if adequate resources are devoted to the task.”
Finally, during the long nights friend Charles cannot sleep, he writes: “Although I don’t think I brought this on myself, I am nonetheless responsible for altering, for the worse, another’s life. I can only guess what goes through her mind as I stumble along, behind her. I feel tremendously guilty.”
Excuse me, but I’m thinking here of friend Charles’ right to life—a life without choking, or hallucinating, a life in which he talks and walks normally and, in his own heartfelt words, no longer is haunted by the fact he’s becoming his wife’s burden.
Medical science failed to save Milly. Let’s now work to save Charles, and all those like him.
|
Outrageous Associations
