Old Age: A Beginner's Guide by Michael Kinsley

Author:Michael Kinsley [Kinsley, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Tags: Biography & Autobiography, Personal Memoirs, Health & Fitness, Diseases, General, Literary Collections, Essays
ISBN: 9781101903766
Google: pKSHjgEACAAJ
Amazon: B016TG5RGU
Publisher: Crown/Archetype
Published: 2016-04-26T04:00:00+00:00

Or is being demented, even mildly, like having a sign on your back that everyone can read except you?

When I’m blue, I look to role models for inspiration. Did I mention that neurologists generally believe that Hitler had Parkinson’s? Francisco Franco and Mao Zedong too, probably. What a trio! These men were demented to be sure, but not necessarily (let’s hope) in the way your grandmother is. Nevertheless, it surely must require a superior intellect to become a fascist dictator (unless you inherit the job, like Bashar al-Assad or Kim Jong-un). Other famous Parkinsonians include George Wallace, Enoch Powell, and Pierre Trudeau. All had big personalities, and maybe that is part of what my doctor meant by “edge.” Or how about this one: Thomas Hobbes. He wrote Leviathan with the help of secretaries, years after his diagnosis of the “shaking palsy.”

Is it just happenstance, I ask you, that both Hitler and Franco were nasty, brutish, and short? Okay, maybe it is just happenstance. And then there’s Michael J. Fox, the world’s most famous living Parkinsonian (that is, not the most famous person to have had Parkinson’s—that would have to be Hitler—but the person most famous for having Parkinson’s). Michael is neither nasty nor brutish—far from it in either case—but he is undeniably short. There are exceptions, such as Chairman Mao, who was a stately five feet eleven.

All in all, it’s an impressive list (although it remains a club I’d just as soon not be a member of). The law of averages does not decree that in any random group of millions of people one or two will turn out to be fascist dictators. In his 2011 book, The Cognitive Neuropsychiatry of Parkinson’s Disease—pretty much a bad-news read—Patrick McNamara, a neurologist at Boston University (and no relation to the former secretary of defense), writes, “PD, apparently, does not prevent creative work of a very high intellectual caliber.”

After some reflection, I concluded that as long as I still felt infallible, Parkinson’s would not stop me from continuing to pursue my dream of becoming pope. If John Paul II could do it, why couldn’t I? The years passed. I got married, went to work for Microsoft, and concluded that any changes in my cognitive ability were pretty minor, and progressing slowly enough so that the truck with my name on it is almost certain to arrive in time to spare me the grimmer options.

But in the two decades since I got my diagnosis, there has been a revolution in thinking about this still-mysterious disease. Parkinson’s has always been classified as a movement disorder. People shake uncontrollably, or they freeze trying to go through a doorway, or they slow down and shuffle when they walk. Mental problems as such were thought to arise only sometimes, after many years. Neurologists now believe that defects (or, as they put it tactfully, “deficits”) in cognition, memory, and other popular mental pursuits can predate the physical symptoms that lead to the diagnosis. The medical journals are full of

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