Photograph by Linda A. Cicero / Stanford News

John L’Heureux, who died on April 22, 2019, at the age of eighty-four, asked for the following essay to accompany “The Escape,” his story in this week’s issue of The New Yorker. L’Heureux published twenty books of fiction and poetry, including the novels “A Woman Run Mad,” “The Shrine at Altamira,” “The Miracle,” and “The Medici Boy.” A collection of new and selected stories, “The Heart Is a Full-Wild Beast,” will be published in December.

I was at work on a new book, and this one was turning out to be work indeed. “The Medici Boy,” a novel about Donatello, had required many years of research, and now the writing was taking nearly as long. But I’ve always held that the writer’s true reward is not money or fame but the writing process itself—making a good thing that did not exist before—and so I worked every day, with varying degrees of satisfaction. However, I was a little distracted by a new oddity with my left hand. Sometimes, as I hit my stride and bent over the computer, typing faster and faster, my left hand would cramp into a flat fish and beat helplessly at the keys. The first time this happened, I sat back and said, “Well, here comes Parkinson’s,” and at once dismissed the thought as hypochondria.

I took a short break from writing, then, calmly, over the next three years finished “The Medici Boy,” which was published simultaneously on the Web and in hardback. It got good reviews—a few very good reviews—but the sales were unimpressive. So much for six years of work. After that, I squandered three more years on a comic novel called “Casa Sayonara,” an ironic look at a retirement home full of rich people who had bought their way through life but found that there was no buying off death. My heart wasn’t in it, and the satire turned rancid. After three separate tries and several hundred misbegotten pages, I called it quits and consigned the manuscript to the garage to be looked at some day, or not. I wrote another novel, with characters I cared about this time, “The Beggar’s Pawn,” which Penguin plans to publish, as a paperback original, in 2020, and I gave myself over to the luxury of being retired.

To celebrate our fortieth wedding anniversary—it was 2011—my wife, Joan, and I had rented an apartment in London for the months of May and June. We had rented there before, in Chelsea, on the King’s Road, one block from Sloane Square. We loved it. Restaurants, bookstores, and, above all, theatre.

We were in London to celebrate, and we did.

There was one small thing, however. Before we left California, I had lost ten pounds, and now, in London, I found I just couldn’t eat. I was, in fact, continually disoriented, with a dizziness that made me feel I was looking at things through a glass, darkly. By the end of June, I had lost thirty-five pounds and was down to a hundred and twenty-eight—what I had weighed in high school.

Back in California, I submitted to a month of tests—bizarre examinations performed on and beneath and inside Rube Goldberg machines—and at the end I was proclaimed a Celiac. Simply put, I had a digestive disorder that made it hard for me to absorb nutrients. In fact, the gluten in my favorite foods—bread, pasta, pancakes, etc.—acted in me as a kind of poison and, no matter what I ate, I lost weight. The fix was easy and anticlimactic: eat only gluten-free foods and, in a while, my body would repair itself. Done and forgotten. Much fuss about nothing.

Since I was seeing doctors twice a week now and was chummy with all of them, I took the opportunity to ask a neurologist about my left hand, which had begun to shake even when I was not typing. “A familial tremor,” he suggested. “Not Parkinson’s? It’s in my family and I thought . . . ” He smiled knowingly, “You’ve got generalized medical anxiety,” which I understood, correctly, to mean hypochondria. “Not to worry,” he said.

Nonetheless, I worried. My father had suffered from Parkinson’s. Three months after his death, my mother had died of A.L.S., so it wouldn’t have been surprising if I had inherited genes marking me for physical and mental deconstruction. I consoled myself with the thought that A.L.S. was worse than Parkinson’s, and—lucky again—I had been spared that.

A year passed and the familial tremor was now diagnosed as “an essential tremor.” A form of Parkinsonism. “But you’re fine,” the doctor said. “Your mind is pretty good and you can still write. You’re fine.” Later, as I began to lurch and stumble, he came close to crediting me with the real thing: “You have,” he said, “a Parkinson’s-like disease.” For years, I had been certain that something was terribly wrong, so the diagnosis—a world-shattering blow to many Parkys—was, to me, less shocking than it was strangely comforting. The damned thing finally had a name. Say it: Parkinson’s disease. I’ve got it and I’ve got to live with it.

I recalled with searing clarity some of the awful moments in my father’s struggle with the disease. The shaking, the frozen limbs, the muddled speech, and, above all, the dread Parkinsonian mask that made laughter impossible and concealed every trace of emotion. And I recalled my incredulity when my father asked my mother about the people in the living room, when in fact nobody was there. And his obsession with “bibbits,” invisible bugs he saw on the tablecloth, the blankets, his pajamas. Life for the two of them became surreal. Eventually, there was home nursing, with its invasion of privacy and infantilizing talk. (And the expense—the incredible expense!) Then, finally, the nursing home, where he was propped up in front of a television, a man who had always hated television, and left there for hours at a time. Toward the end, when we went to see him, he did not know who we were, but said politely that it was good to see us and we were very kind to visit. Heartbreak comes just when you think nothing worse can happen.

My father’s long agony had been over since 1985, but it was still fresh in my mind, and now it was my turn. I was put on Sinemet, a Parkinson’s drug of choice, and, in time, eight other medications. They worked just fine, though they grew less effective from year to year. I kept on writing, as if I were immune to the memory loss and brain deficiency common to late Parkinson’s. When I asked if it was possible that my brain would continue to function, I was assured that every Parkinson’s patient was unique, and so my brain might well see me out. That may be, I told myself, but I could not cite even one unique Parky who had escaped with brain intact.

Early in my years as a writer I had published three volumes of short fiction, and then for many years I had written only novels. Now, with the Great NeverNever just around the corner, I did not want to die—or, worse, lose my marbles—in the middle of a three- or four-hundred-page novel. All that work—and time—gone to waste. Better to try a story, finite in conception and execution, and less depressing to leave behind unfinished. So I determined to concentrate on the short story. This, however, proved nearly impossible, since every story kept trying to turn into a novel.