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In the early stages, Parkinson's is mainly a matter of foreboding, which makes denial an especially effective therapy. If you fool yourself skillfully enough, you can banish thoughts of the disease but retain a liberating sense of urgency. It's like having a Get Out of Jail Free card from the prison of delayed gratification. Skip the Democratic Convention to go kayaking in Alaska? Absolutely. Do it now, in case you can't do it later. So what if you had zero desire to kayak in Alaska until faced with the prospect that someday you couldn't? You want to now. And that's good. Although I wouldn't actually recommend Parkinson's for this reason, the diagnosis is a pretty valuable warning shot from the Grim Reaper. The victims of Sept. 11 had minutes to list their regrets. I've got decades to scratch items off the list.
So I recommend denial--and defend it as a legitimate option. To work effectively, though, denial requires secrecy, and secrecy pretty much requires deception. It's simply easier to go through the day not thinking about Parkinson's disease if the people you interact with don't know you have it. This complicates the case for denial. Deceiving yourself may offend the cultural prejudice in favor of relentless self-knowledge, but it does not offend me. What you do with yourself in the privacy of your head is nobody else's business. On the other hand, deceiving those around you is more troublesome. Especially if you're a journalist, whose whole professional value system is wrapped up in the idea of the truth: demanding it of others, telling it yourself.
For eight years I have tried not to tell outright lies, but there have been some Clintonian evasions and prissy parsing. (Q: "You look tired. Are you O.K.?" A: "I feel fine.") And my basic intention has been to deceive. So I'm sorry about that. Some topics--Is it decaf?--require absolute honesty. With others--military secrets, noncontagious diseases--there may be legitimate exceptions.
The least a misfortune can do to make up for itself is to be interesting. Parkinson's disease has fulfilled that obligation, among other ways, by plunging me into a maze of deception and self-deception. I have no idea how well my deception efforts have worked, and I don't intend to believe everyone who claims to have known all along. But in the past couple of years, it seems to me, the symptoms have become more evident. There have been rumors. And the short, somewhat random, list of people who know my secret because I told them has got longer--probably too long for all the pledges of secrecy to hold.
I've come to assume that many or even most of the people I interact with every day actually do know my secret and are pretending not to. It's been like living in that classic childhood fantasy (which was the basis for the Jim Carrey movie The Truman Show) that what seems like reality is actually a giant play that everyone else is performing for your benefit. Only this play has a Pirandellian twist: while people are putting on a performance for you, you are putting on a performance for them. Or are they? (And are you?) Even this orgy of mutual pretense was better than facing the truth in every dealing with other people, I thought, and still think.