Long post. Beautifully written. 💜

From Michael J Whelan who is fighting cancer and his wife has Parkinson’s. “I'M SO TIRED! There’s a moment in this journey when denial dies quietly in the corner, and hope, the stubborn candle, flickers but does not go out.
It is here when the neurologist stops suggesting, and starts testing.
Not reflexes or memory games anymore. Not whispered notes about gait and balance and pill-rolling tremors.
This is different.

This is the stage where the veil lifts,
and no one is pretending it’s just stress or aging or a bad day anymore.

This is the stage where they say “DaTscan.”
Where radioactive tracers trace what dopamine used to do.
They inject a future into her bloodstream
and ask you to lie still while a machine reads the spaces
where joy once fired freely between synapses.

This is the stage where they say “skin biopsy.”
Where they carve a little piece of her out
to study under glass,
searching for alpha-synuclein
like it’s some lost code to the life you had before. My lord the words and terms I've had to learn.

And then you nod.
You say yes.
Because you need answers but answers cost more than money now.
They cost pieces of her. Pieces of me.😢

She’s quiet lately.
This morning she was hysterical.
Now she's more distant.
Last night so confused.
And when she speaks, the words come out slower and jumbled, like they’re stuck in thick honey.
You see it. You hear it. But you find it hard to understand it.
You feel it in the way she clutches your hand a little longer
after each moment as if I have all the answers. But I know longer do.😢

This is the part where your chest tightens every time the phone rings, where you Google terms you can't even pronounce and scan message boards at midnight searching for a story like yours that ends with mercy and hope.

This is the part where you learn
how heavy love really is.
How brutal it can be
to care this deeply,
to dress her wounds
and keep her spirits up when yours are falling apart.

You are the care partner. But what you really are
is the witness to this head on collision with a life-threatening illness.
To the unraveling.
To the bravery.
To the before and after of a woman you love more than words allow.

And no one tells you
how lonely it is how isolating it is to walk beside someone you can’t save.
To put on a brave face for family and friends while quietly mourning the vanishing of her strength, her spark,
her self.

They call it “the serious stage.”
But there is no stage that isn’t. There is only before the tests
and after the silence.

This is where you are now. Where the questions have sharper teeth,
and the nights stretch longer than any diagnosis.

You are still fighting.
Still showing up.
Still wrapping love around every fragile inch of what remains.
That makes you a warrior whether or not the world sees it.

And if the tests confirm what your heart already knows,
you will keep walking with her.
Through the tremors.
Through the forgetting.
Through the sacred storm of it all.

Because love doesn’t stop
when the symptoms start.

It grows louder.

Even in the silence.😢👩‍❤️‍💋‍👨”