Ryan Reynolds opens up about his late father’s long battle with Parkinson’s

By Lisa Respers France, CNN

(CNN) — Ryan Reynolds lost his father in 2015 after a 20-year battle with Parkinson’s disease. He’s reflecting on the challenges the diagnosis brought his father and his family, as well as what he learned from his dad.

In an interview People, the “Deadpool & Wolverine” star said his Vancouver based family rarely talked about the debilitating disease.

“He said the word ‘Parkinson’s’ maybe three times as far as I knew — and one of them wasn’t to me,” Reynolds said. “There was a ton of denial, a ton of hiding.”

The actor had a complicated relationship with his father, James, who he described as a “man who does not share his feelings.”

“He was a boxer, a cop, a hard-a**. I can’t even recall ever really having a proper conversation with my father,” Reynolds reflected. “He was a present father, never missed a football game, but he just didn’t have the capacity to feel, or at least share, the full spectrum of human emotion a bit.”

Hallucinations and delusions were part of the progressive disease that the younger Reynolds said helped to increase the divide with his dad.

“At the time I just thought, ‘My dad’s losing his mind.’ My father was really slipping down a rabbit hole where he was struggling to differentiate between reality and fiction. And subsequently everyone else in his life was losing the bedrock faith and trust that they had on his point of view,” Reynolds said. “There would be conspiratorial webs that he would spin about ‘this is happening’ and that ‘these people might be after me’ or ‘this person is out to get me.’ And just stuff that was such a wild departure from the man that I grew up with and knew.”

Over the years since his father’s death, Reynolds said he’s been “constantly putting pieces of the story together.”

“I wasn’t really accepting my own responsibility. It was very easy for me to dine off the idea that my father and I do not see eye to eye on anything and that an actual relationship with him is impossible,” Reynolds said. “And as I’m older now, I look back at it, and I think of it more as that was my unwillingness at the time to meet him where he was.”

Now being a father of four young children with wife Blake Lively, daughters James, Inez, and Betty, and a son named Olin, has given Reynolds perspective, he said.

“The healing for me really comes more through my relationship with my own kids, while taking some of the things from my father that are of immense value,” he said. “My dad had incredible integrity. He did not lie. [Now] I get to fill in those little gaps that maybe hurt me. I get to show up.”

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