In 1817, Dr. James Parkinson described a disease that he called “shaking palsy.” Almost 190 years later, on January 19, 2006, a neurologist calmly announced that I had just been given a “shaking palsy” life sentence. Parkinson's disease (PD). You see, people rarely die from PD, but they have to learn to live with its constantly degenerative nature. It is like someone tapping you on the shoulder 24/7, telling you things will only get worse.
It all starts innocently enough, perhaps with just an annoying twitch in your baby finger, but then it progresses to a pronounced tremor in your right hand when you have a confrontation with your youngest child or are under stress at work. From there, you start noticing the stiffness in your arm on one side of your body, resulting in a kind of off-balance arm swing and an uneven gait. You become more easily fatigued, experience difficulty sleeping, and sadness seems a regular state of mind.
And there are odd things happening. You notice that you are losing, or have already lost, your sense of smell. You startle easily and find it difficult to explain why you lose your balance regularly or get cramps in your feet. These classic signs of PD are only the beginning, and since everyone who has the disease experiences it differently you don’t know which symptom will hit you or when. For some it is painful, fast moving, and can literally take control of your body in a couple of years. For others, including me, it is a slow and reasonably painless loss of function due to a constant tremor, stiffness, and fatigue. The cause of PD has not been pinpointed, although it appears to be to some extent genetic as well as environmental. In my case, I grew up in an orchard where spraying the apple trees with green, toxic chemicals was a regular springtime event. My father died a year ago from complications related to PD.
Given the horror of PD and other more devastating afflictions, I am surprised that there is not more suicide by those with “incurable” degenerative diseases. But there is something irrepressible that lives deep within us, something that sees the distant light in even the darkest night. It seems to me that Alexander Pope was right when he wrote in An Essay on Man, “Hope springs eternal in the human breast.” 1 Who else but God could have planted that seed of hope within our soul? Hope, it seems to me, falls outside the simplistic rubric and theory of cosmic chemical evolution. Is it possible to live without hope? Surely Dante was right when he labelled hell as a hopeless existence, and conversely, hopelessness is a kind of hell. But who has no hope? As Ecclesiastes 9:4 states, “Anyone who is among the living has hope.”
What is hope—real, sustainable, no matter what happens hope? To understand the end of hope, perhaps it is best to start at the beginning. What is the source of human hope? “Hope is the word which God has written on the brow of every man,” Victor Hugo once said. I Corinthians 13:13 says hope is eternal. And if God created us with the capacity for hope, we should be able to give an answer to the question, what is the reason for the hope that is in you? The Psalmists answered this question on numerous occasions by stating, “My hope is in the Lord.” And when there come times of desperation, we cry out with Job, “Though he slay me, yet will I hope in him” (Job 13:15).
For me, PD is like experiencing the aging process in fast-forward. Despite doing my utmost to cling to the physical and mental vitality I once knew, my 57- year-old body and mind mourn the ever-increasing loss of youthful vigour and resilience. Life is degenerative. But even so, I can choose where to place my hope. I can decide to put my hope in proven-fallible human effort, including my own, or cling to the promise of Isaiah 40:31, “But those who hope in the Lord will renew their strength. They will soar on wings like eagles; they will run and not grow weary, they will walk and not be faint.”
Parkinson's disease can quite easily lead to a predictable march into hopelessness. But even if my hope becomes shrivelled and parched from time to time, I know it will never disappear. It is like a seed—even if it lies dormant for a season, it will endure. It will prevail. It will rise as if from the dead.
Whether a cure for PD comes along or not, this conclusion comforts me daily: It is not what you hope for that determines the path of your life, but rather Whom you hope in. With the old hymn I will sing, “My hope is built on nothing less” than Jesus.
