People sometimes mistake humor for avoidance, as if laughing means I haven’t fully grasped the seriousness of what is happening to me. Trust me, after decades with Parkinson’s, I have read the fine print.
I don’t laugh because the disease is harmless. I laugh because it has already taken enough, and I’m not handing it the punchline too. Humor gives me a few inches of space between who I am and what Parkinson’s is doing to my body.
There is nothing funny about falling, freezing, losing independence, or watching your future get rewritten by a disease that never bothered to ask permission. But there can be something hilarious about the absurd machinery surrounding it: the medication schedule that requires air-traffic control, the body that starts dancing during a serious conversation, or the stranger who recommends yoga as if thirty-three years of neurology simply forgot to stretch.
Humor lets me name those contradictions without pretending they are harmless. It is not a curtain pulled over fear. It is a spotlight pointed directly at fear while I ask why the bastard is wearing such ridiculous shoes.
It also creates connection. When I make a joke about something another person with Parkinson’s has been afraid to say out loud, I can feel the room exhale. Nobody has been cured, but somebody feels less alone. That is not trivial. Isolation can shrink a life long before the disease does.
There are days when I cannot find the joke, and I do not force it. Comedy is a tool, not another standard I have to fail. I am allowed to be angry, scared, exhausted, or completely humorless when that is the truth.
But when laughter does show up, I let it be loud. That space is where dignity survives, where connection happens, and where fear briefly loses the microphone. Laughter does not erase the truth. Sometimes it is the fiercest way I know to tell it.