A pause as I emerge from the holiday season. It has been a strange—and genuinely holy—season for me this year.

My son, Peter, is very ill. I spent much of the month of December in Milwaukee where he was in the hospital undergoing tests. Three years ago, he was diagnosed as having young-onset Parkinson’s, but his symptoms never quite fit Parkinson’s, and his condition worsened much too rapidly. Finally, he was hospitalized to seek an answer, and after two weeks of inconclusive tests, the doctors found one. He has a disease called Diffuse Lewy Body Disease or LBD, a disease in which a protein invades the brain causing symptoms of Parkinson’s that don’t respond well to medication, dementia and visual hallucinations. It is a disease that ordinarily affects only the elderly. My son is forty-one years old.