Marni Jackson Special to The Globe and Mail Published 1 minute ago

Marni Jackson is a writer based in Toronto whose books include Pain: The Fifth Vital Sign and Don’t I Know You?

It started with the little finger on my right hand. I was walking through the Toronto Necropolis near my home in Cabbagetown, not thinking about my mortality at all but wishing the dead around me well, when I noticed a tremor in my baby finger. Nothing alarming, I thought; my mother and maternal grandmother were both shaky in their old age. They had, apparently, “essential tremor,” not to be confused with the multisymptom spectrum of Parkinson’s, a degenerative neurological disease in which the neurons in the substantia nigra , a part of the brain that normally produces dopamine, begin to die off.

Unp

See Full Page