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WHO IS THAT IN THE MIRROR


I walked by the bathroom mirror this morning and had an unpleasant surprise.
I did not know the person staring back at me.  I saw the unmoving, frozen
face of another...another what, I have no idea.  A stranger?

Today's experience taught me a new meaning to the "masked expression".
Through eighteen years of parkinson's disease I have known the term "masked"
to be the inability to use facial muscles due to bradykinesia and rigidity.
Finding the stranger, hauntingly staring back at me, the masked expression
became the stranger that I would always see.

Quite crazily I began to ask; "What have you done with Sandra?"   Just as
quickly as I had asked,  I saw a movement;  it was fleeting, if at all.  A
single tear fell from the strange face.  I looked closer and there reflected
in the mirror were my eyes, conveying the sadness felt in my heart at the
realization that the masked stranger was going to be staying for awhile.

Although the new and strange face looks rather old to me, old in years some
would say,  I would prefer wise in pd years.  The glimpse of the eyes add
familiarity, a warmness of life.  The realization that they are my eyes
bring a calmness, a hope of knowing that just because the face is changing
the eyes remain the same.  The inner soul is affected by the strange face;
but, desires to go on living.  This soul desires and searches for a better
and brighter tomorrow in living with parkinson's disease.

Who is that in the mirror?  A strange face, with a knowing vision of a
brighter and better tomorrow.

Sandra L. Norris
David and Sandy Norris

"Faith is the daring of the soul to go farther
than it can see."  William Newton Clarke
Sandy 38/dx'd for 11/had pd for 19yrs