Michael J. Fox: In Sickness, In Health, In Parkinson’s

A note to young leaders.

There’s a line in the theme song of a 1980’s TV sitcom that I’ve come to believe should be the motto of every family in the world.

The show was Family Ties. It ran on NBC from 1982 to 1989, and the song was called “Without Us”.

It’s a wistful, soft rock ballad that was written to be heard over the opening credits and forgotten before the first commercial, and for the most part it was. Except for one line in the chorus, which is a humdinger:

“And there ain’t no nothin’ we can’t love each other through.”

That’s what a family should say to each and every member every day: “Come what may, no matter what, we will love one another through it.”

Not around it, as if it were a puddle. Not after it, when the danger has passed. Through it. In it. While it’s happening. While you are at your worst, and I may be at my lowest.

Family Ties catapulted the career of Michael J. Fox, who went on to star in the Back To The Future films.
In 1985, Tracy Pollan joined Family Ties as Michael’s love interest. He married her in real life three years later.

Three years after that, at 29, Fox woke one morning with his little finger moving of its own accord. He called it “auto-animated”, which is the sort of word a man reaches for when he’s not ready for the real one. The real one was Parkinson’s.

When he told Tracy, Fox remembers her whispering four words: “in sickness and in health.” She did not blink. And nor has she blinked in the thirty-five years since, as they jointly raised four children.

In 2002, Michael sat before a US Senate subcommittee with Muhammad Ali beside him, and told them that the money for Parkinson’s research was nowhere near the size of the problem. The foundation he started in 2000 has since funded more than USD 3 billion of research into the disease, more than all other non-government funders put together, and last month it set out to raise another USD 2.5 billion.

Nothing is too great or too small for you to share with your family – nothing, absolutely nothing, is too difficult for a family’s love to embrace, absorb and heal.

“There ain’t no nothin’ we can’t love each other through.” What a line that is. How powerful a family becomes when it adopts this line as its creed.