In My Father’s Footsteps

I was eighteen months old when my father was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease, a name that would become as familiar within our family as any of our own. It was part of him but eventually, inevitably, it would become part of all of us. The two monoliths that dominated my father’s identity – the peak and the trough of his life – were Love Story and Parkinson’s disease.

I am now twenty-eight, and my father has been seriously ill for all of my conscious memory. I know nothing else and it is impossible for me to look with any real perspective at how it has affected me. For a long time I believed that I had accepted it. But lately I have begun to realize that my long-standing coping mechanisms are failing me, and that the denial of his illness, in which I have operated for most of my life, is causing more damage than it prevents.

I had separated who he was in my childhood from who he is now; compartmentalizing so I had both a relatively healthy father for whom I felt a constant, powerful nostalgia and a fiercely protective pride, and someone else entirely; a father I love equally who is battling with a vicious neurological disease. It was too painful for me to face the reality that one had become the other, and until very recently I fought to keep the first uncontaminated by the second. But the right way to honour him, both who he was and who he is, was to bring them together.

I had no idea how to effect that integration, but going back to his beginnings seemed a good place to start. And so in the summer of 2008 I went to Bedford-Stuyvesant, to try to understand where he came from and where I came from. I wanted to be able to see him clearly again, to rediscover him, even if it hurt.