Laugh, cry with Michael J. Fox’s word tapestry
WHEN Michael J. Fox told the world, in 1998, that he had been fighting Parkinson's disease for the past seven years, it felt devastating to me in many ways. For one thing, like a lot of people of my generation, I had been a big fan of the hit ’80s TV sitcom Family Ties.
Fox’s disclosure was doubly shocking as not only was he just 29 when he was diagnosed, he was also not the kind of celebrity who seemed vulnerable at all. To imagine him compromised in any crisis seemed impossible. For a while I had no idea how to process his struggles, though I was amazed he was still surviving as the years went by. I assumed wealth and celebrity were part of what kept him alive. Those privileges might have been a piece of it, but it wasn’t until I got sick myself, with late-stage Lyme disease, that I realised how much one’s attitude can also factor into one’s health, and that while a positive outlook can’t save you, a very strong drive to live certainly counts for something.
I thought about it a lot reading Fox’s recent memoir, his fourth book, No Time Like the Future: An Optimist Considers Mortality. The book joins his other works in showing what attitude means to the illness equation. But unlike his other memoirs, here he is not just walking us through his diagnosis and the subsequent traumas of living publicly with a degenerative disorder. That piece of it is well known by now, and in fact there are many young people who know Fox more for his illness than for his acting.
This time Fox’s story is focused on something more unthinkable – the other things that can go wrong with a body that’s still carrying a devastating disease, whether it is just the wear and tear of ageing or other, more serious afflictions. This book centres on life going on for better or for worse, pivoting ultimately on a particularly impossible 2018, Fox’s “annus horriblis” as he calls it. Fox underwent major spinal surgery after a tumour had been found on his spinal cord – unrelated to his Parkinson’s – and he had also taken a very bad fall – related to his Parkinson’s. The combination gave him and his family a whole new set of hurdles. Not to mention here
