I noticed it before he did, I think, though neither of us said anything at the time. We were having coffee at his kitchen table, the way we did most Saturdays, and I watched his hand shake as he poured. Just a little. A small tremor, gone almost as soon as I saw it. I figured it was nothing. Too much coffee, maybe, or a bad night’s sleep. He didn’t mention it, so I didn’t either.
That was the first thing I noticed, but it wasn’t the last. Over the next year or so, small things kept showing up. He got quieter at dinner, not sad exactly, just slower to speak, like the words took longer to reach him. He started turning down invitations he used to accept without thinking. A friend of ours joked that he was getting lazy in his old age, and he laughed along, but I remember his laugh sounding tired that day.
It was almost two years before he told me he’d finally gone to see a doctor. He said it plainly, the way he says most things. Parkinson’s disease. I didn’t know much about it then, only the name, only a vague picture of what it might mean. He told me the diagnosis brought relief more than fear. At least now there was a reason. At least now that shaking hand from that Saturday morning made sense.
I won’t pretend this has been easy for him, because it hasn’t. I’ve watched him drop things he used to carry without a second thought. I’ve seen him need help with a shirt button, embarrassed by something so small. I’ve sat across from him at restaurants while he asked for a spoon instead of a fork. None of that is easy to watch in someone you care about, and I know it isn’t easy for him to live through, either.
But something else happened too, something I didn’t expect, and it’s the part of this I think about most.
He used to move through life so fast. He ate breakfast standing at the counter, phone in hand, half-listening to whatever I was saying if I happened to call that early. He drove the same road to work for fifteen years and once told me he couldn’t have named a single tree along it. His life had a pace, and I don’t think either of us questioned it. We just assumed that was what a full life looked like.
Parkinson’s slowed him down, whether he wanted that or not. Some mornings, he told me, it takes him forty minutes just to get dressed. Walking to his own mailbox takes planning he never used to need. And in all that slowness, something in him changed that I don’t think either of us saw coming.
He told me once about a Tuesday in March, when he was walking his usual road to get the mail, moving slower than he ever had in his life, and the light came through the bare branches in long gold lines across the frost. He said he just stood there and watched it. A full minute, maybe more. He told me he wasn’t sure he’d really looked at light like that in years.
I’ve noticed the change in him myself, too. He asks better questions now. He listens longer before answering. When I talk to him about my own life, my own worries, he isn’t already halfway to the next thing. He’s just there with me, because rushing isn’t something available to him anymore.
He would tell you himself that he isn’t grateful for the disease, and I believe him completely. Given the choice, he would trade this slower, harder life for his old one in an instant. But he wasn’t given that choice. This is the life he has now. And in it, I’ve watched my friend learn to notice light on frost, to listen when someone he loves is speaking, to sit still long enough for a friendship, ours included, to grow into something steadier than it was before.
I think about that Saturday morning often, his hand shaking slightly over the coffee pot, neither of us knowing yet what it meant. We were just two people going about an ordinary day, the way most people do, not thinking about disease until it starts to become real.
