Steady

Cruises are weird, and Parkinson's is hard, & here we are (afloat)

The ship swayed.

Five days into our cruise, my family was nauseous. Barreling north along the Baja Peninsula, we cut the humid curtain of night, and canted with our ship, which was big - a floating slab of middle America. The thing had a casino, ice skating rink, karaoke bars, swimming pools, water slides, a “Flow Rider” surf wave, a rock climbing wall, tennis and soccer and pickle-ball, Starbucks, a Celine Dion impersonator, vaulted dining rooms with chandeliers and multi-course meals, and 1,000 cheery staff who deftly handled the revolving assault of 3,000 guests entitled to FUN.

Maybe the crew were truly so perky. Maybe they quietly seethed. I wouldn’t blame them.

It was an alternate universe. And our ship/city bobbed on a set of strong waves. Wobble, baby, wobble played from the pool deck, and the boat obeyed.

My dad wobbled too: his Parkinson’s tremors incessant. Twelve years into diagnosis, the disease now exacerbated vicious back and hip pain. He teetered with the ship.

I longed to steady all of it.

Eyes closed, I lay on my top bunk that fifth night - my 14-year old niece asleep on the bottom bunk - and I felt the ship dip left to right.

How do I absorb it? Where is the stillness?

I wanted a center of gravity.

Five days prior, we boarded the ship.

I careened into our vacation like a paper plane nose-diving. I’d traveled all summer prior: Pennsylvania, New York, South Carolina, Oregon, Sacramento, Tahoe, Pennsylvania again, Washington D.C. It felt like I didn’t live in LA anymore. Like I was an extraterrestrial: hovering, then dropping in.

Now: a cruise.

My family goes 100mph on vacations like these. No activity is left behind, and we win family trivia, and we sing karaoke - along with the surfing and the soccer tournament (my brother won) and the water slides and the Celine Dion show (the impersonator was weirdly good). My dad used his walker to get around. The stiff curve of his back made most chairs uncomfortable, most activities impossible. I sat with him and talked, and then bounced to the 17 other things the family had planned.

In my moments alone, to recalibrate, I ran on a treadmill. I listened to “Crying in H-Mart” on Audible and ran 55 miles in one week at the back of the ship, facing the ocean.

… Running on a treadmill
upon a boat
that is swaying.

Motion on motion. It’s my life motif. “I rest in motion.” (ha)

A day on the cruise went like this:

• Wake at 7:30AM in my snug cabin (shared with my niece and aunt)

• Coffee at 8AM with my mom + nieces + aunt (Starbucks’ burnt beans on Deck 4)

• Breakfast with all 10 of us in a chaos of conversation, melon, eggs, and 14 shapes of carbs with syrup.

• Treadmill and flying sweat alone at the gym.

• Surfing and climbing and trivia and water slides and swimming and excursions all afternoon...

• With a 2-hour window to write my screenplay as my niece (the one who’s 14) wrote her fantasy novel (honestly prolific) next to me.

• Dinner for 10 - swapping bites and singing nonsensical songs and my nephew Finn sitting on my lap needing cuddles and smelling like shampoo and sunscreen.

• 7PM evening show: a la Celine Dion-ish, or an abbreviated flow of pop songs from the past 3 decades with loud outfits and interesting dance moves, or karaoke (my niece asked me to sing “Love Story” with her. I agreed, and I got on one knee for the “marry me, Juliet” part. I did that thing.)

• Retiring to the room by 10PM to be best friends with Piper and my tender Aunt Marge and laugh about dumb/wonderful things I can’t remember but that warm me.

It was fun. It was feverish day after day. And I’d watch my dad participate however he could. I’d watch my mom watch him, with love. Concern. I’d prepare myself to leave the floating slab and return to the vortex of LA.

Motion upon motion upon motion.

So… by the time the ship hit those waves, in the dark of my cabin, a few feet removed from the tumult of the sea, I wanted it to stop.

I wanted rest.

I wanted to still the change, the shifts of age and Parkinson’s. I wanted to steady my father’s body - to absorb the grief of weakness - my mom’s burdens, the canted future.

Steady.

It was strange to look at my dad and resonate. To see incessant muscle tremors and feel like that’s me also, but inside.

I’ve lost my stillness too, Dad.

I’ve made myself so radically “flexible” in my Los Angeles life, that sometimes those who know me best ask me: “Em, where’d you go?” as I zoom and hover and land and perpetuate the joke that I can “teleport.”

I’ve embodied a radical flexibility that is both a superpower and sometimes… a problem.

I’ve believed I can thrive in motion (I often can),
rest in motion (sometimes, ya),
that I can hover with internal zen while hurtling forward at 90mph.

But the fact is, I’m still commuting 3 hours a day many days, criss-crossing, rarely putzing, full-tilting, and then changing outfits in my car after running 10 miles through the city, to make it to the next event.

I would like to be still.

I’m nervous to be.

And the schedule isn’t the problem, actually. It’s this inner churning, the drive to make a connection between so many worlds, to make sense of it all, to outpace the void, and then… to maximize this time that I’ve got alive and to build a career that does some good and to be with people.

Steady.

(You might feel my waves even as you read this.)

So there I was, on a swaying ship with my family, my father and his Parkinson’s, my joyous/tired upheaval of a life, and… I  craved that center of gravity.

I stayed back with my dad on the ship one afternoon, while the rest of the family ventured to Puerto Vallarta. Eleven stories up (there were thirteen stories on that boat. Thirteen.), we faced floor-to-ceiling windows: the coast of Mexico sprawled beyond our temporary harbor. I worked on my feature script while my dad read next to me, his tremors in my periphery.

It’s vivid.

That moment.

I can feel the muggy air now. Pressed hot at our necks. Then: the splash of kids leaping into pools behind us. The feathery flip: my father turning the pages of a novel. And my sprinting mind, hard to focus, next to his steady spirit.

He read calmly, and I typed a few words a minute. He’d make a comment, or I would. He has a lovely sense of humor. And there was goodness in his presence near me. It settled me.

It re-forms even now within me. That memory was stillness.

A body can move involuntary, yes. Illness does that. But there is something within us that means more, that matters expansively: a spirit so grounded that it calms fears as it faces them, makes enough space for them to be what they are, but in the context of joy… a life lived toward Love.

My dad is this way. (Gosh, my mom too.)

And it is a different center of gravity.

Calm spirit, swaying body.

On a ridiculous bobbing slab of Middle America, with Celine’s look-a-like waiting somewhere in the wings, and all of the staff perky to the max, and the water slides and the ice skating rink, I feel something else.

What’s right here, behind the very real upheaval of things we can see, is another real thing:

It has carried us, whatever surface waves come and go, it is an ocean, and we - I - rest upon it.

Just for a moment, pause with me.

It is wonderful to sit on this couch now and recall the cruise with you. I picture my father, brow furrowed into his book, pausing to sip water, tremors ongoing, but his breath a rhythm too, and I look now out this window at the Jacaranda tree that blooms violet each spring. I stretch my legs.

That friendly tree bows over my street. Without fail. The sun rises and climbs the sky, then sets - day upon day upon day for us - and the ocean greets the shore, consistently, and a boat can sway, but all 13 decks of activities and dining rooms and all the chaos … floats,

and there is something steady
at the base of motion,

Available to us. We rest on it.

And I think I’ll call and say:

I’ve found my stillness too, Dad.