Michael's feelings, his emotions, are not a part of his life.
So as he said to me one day, he said, I don't feel like I love you, but I know I love you.
Lauren Field met her husband Michael in 1969.
The 28-year-old lawyer from Washington DC had just been sent to the Bay Area after serving
a year in Vietnam.
The couple married and moved to a beautiful house in Biedmont, where they had two children,
Catherine and Robert.
Michael was a successful lawyer in San Francisco, while Lauren worked as a psychotherapist in
Oakland.
We used to spend hours talking, just talking about politics, about books, about things that
we'd read, about plans that we wanted to do.
But things changed in 1985, when Michael felt a tremor in his legs.
In the middle of the night, if he got up to go to the bathroom, I would hear him shuffle.
He'd walk like an old man.
Then I noticed that his face didn't look right.
I kept looking at him thinking, what is wrong with his face?
And I realized over time that his face had stopped moving, and his eyes no longer blinked,
he no longer was twinkly and sparkly and animated.
So I said to him one day, Michael, I think you need to go to the doctor.
The doctors started treating Michael for a variant of Parkinson's disease.
But just two years ago, he was diagnosed with something worse.
PSP is short for progressive super nuclear palsy, and it's a progressive neurodegenerative
brain disorder.
According to Robin Riddle, co-founder of the largest PSP support group in the United States,
20,000 people above the age of 60 suffer from PSP.
Compared to the 1 million people affected by Parkinson's, PSP is a rare disease.
We don't know the cause, we don't know the treatment, and we don't yet know how to cure
the disease.
The disorder impairs many functions of the body, including movement, balance, and eyesight.
But the hardest thing to do is communicate.
The muscles in the throat eventually start to deteriorate, and they become disarthric,
which means that they have slurred speech.
So it can be very difficult to understand someone with PSP.
Michael had to resign from his work as a trial lawyer when jurors complained that they could
not hear him in court.
Since then, every day has been a trial for Michael and for Lauren.
You're cold.
You're okay?
I know you say you're okay, but you're still cold.
The things that I have to help him with are just about everything.
He needs help showering, he needs help getting out of bed, he needs help getting to the bathroom.
I think I wonder who's going to take care of me today.
Who's going to help me get out of bed, who's going to help me get dressed.
But there is one thing Michael does not need help with.
I've probably been interested in art since I was about 16.
My brother was taking guitar lessons, and my mother said, what would you like to do?
I said, I'd like to go to art school.
Art was always a hobby for Michael, but it became a passion when he joined the Oakland
School of Classical Realism seven years ago.
What I noticed about his artwork that sort of set him apart was just the remarkable emotive
power of it, even though it wasn't quite so precise as some of the other students.
There was a depth to it that was really quite uncanny.
When you look at it, you feel the life of a human being being put onto the page.
And when I look at other artists' work, you know, old masters and new, that's something
that I look for.
And there aren't that many that are able to do that really.
Michael is unusual in other ways.
I've never seen this.
All of the patients that I'm aware of who have some artistic ability before having the
disease, the artistic ability is completely lost within a few years of the disease.
It's just a relentless and exerobal decline.
That's very good.
It's just all-involving.
I'm completely involved in it all.
I forget the things I'm concerned about, I forget my concern about the stock market
or anything like that.
I forget that I'm handicapped.
I just become a bit involved in the drawing, the reproduction of the image.
Patients with PSP have an estimated survival time of six to nine years after the onset of
the disease.
Michael, now 67, has lived with it far longer.
And though PSP has no known medical treatment, perhaps that is only one part of the picture.
I have worked with people who have debilitating brain diseases before.
And when the lights go out, that is when there's nothing in your life anymore, you die.
And so I think that Michael's interest in art have helped keep him alive, helped keep
him as vibrant as he can be.
So I'm very grateful that his mother insisted that since Larry was learning to play the
classical guitar, he had to learn something too.
And he selected art, because he can do it.
