#50 - What a Parkinson's Diagnosis Teaches you About Dying — and Living
What does it look like when someone goes from being terrified of death to genuinely at peace with it, not because things got easier, but because they stopped waiting for them to?
This call is a conversation with an anonymous caller living with Parkinson's disease. We talk about what it actually felt like to carry debilitating death anxiety for years, lose a parent young, and then receive a diagnosis that could have broken them and didn't.
A lot of the conversation is about purpose. The caller describes finding it in an unexpected place: a community built almost by accident, through an Instagram journal nobody was supposed to read. What grew from that became a book, a podcast, a blog, and something harder to name. A reason to keep going that didn't exist before the diagnosis did.
We also talk about what it means to hold hope and belief at the same time when they don't perfectly line up. About parenting through a progressive illness. About dark humor as a survival tool, not a deflection. And about why the caller describes their diagnosis as a gift. Not to be positive. Because they actually mean it.
Book recommendation:Tuesdays with Morrie by Mitch Albom
If you’d like to watch this conversation instead of just listening, you can find the video version on YouTube.
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