ABSTRACT
This hermeneutic-phenomenological study offers an understanding of what it means to be a person living with Parkinson’s disease. It does so through a close examination of the lifeworld of a woman with Parkinson’s whom I call Elsa. The lifeworld or Lebenswelt is “the realm of immediate human experience” (Halling, 2008: 155) which is constituted out of shared human structures or fractions which are implicated in all our experiences. These fractions include our embodied natures, our relationships with time, the various activities we are committed to and care for, our moodedness or attunement and the fact that we inhabit a world with and of others (Ashworth, 2016). They can be seen as heuristics, links in the existential chain (Van Der Bruggen & Widdershoven, 2004) which elucidate and clarify lifeworlds. Furthermore, “Each fraction is there for any phenomenon whatsoever, though some fractions may be weightier for the meaning of a given phenomenon than others” (Ashworth, 2016: 23).
