First symptom was 1992. Age 39. A slight tremor in my right hand as I raised a glass to my lips gradually became an inability to walk by 2000.

In 1992 I was at the end of the Decade From Hell. It had started with my father's suicide just months after my marriage. Life went on as my wife and I remodeled an old farmhouse, sold it, used the equity to buy an old trailer, bought some very rural property to move it to, gutted it and remodeled, stood in the rain and watched it burn everything that wasn't on our backs, lived in a small camper as we tried to turn $8000 of insurance into a house, moved in with paternal grandparents to help them deal with her terminal cancer, got a call Halloween night that the rural house was on fire, total loss to arson, wrestled with insurance company for a year, cared for and buried four grandparents over eight year period, wife's health problems put her in a wheel chair for six months with an unknown future, had a house built, moved in. Oh, and had been running the small family business the whole time. Vacations? Hah! Boy, was I stupid!!

You see why I suspect stress in all this? Anyway, the light years leading to 2000 were a little better though filled with problems of a more mundane nature.

I guess I still share some things with that former self just not so excessive. I've learned to accept my limits, that I don't have to be a hero, and that the world spins at the same rate whether I'm pushing or not.