Morgan Freeman Discusses His Fibromyalgia

Esquire features an lengthy interview with Morgan Freeman, This Earth That Holds Me Fast Will Find Me Breath.

Here is the money quote, emphasis added:

Every so often he grabs his left shoulder and winces. It hurts when he walks, when he sits still, when he rises from his couch, and when he missteps in a damp meadow. More than hurts. It seems a kind of agony, though he never mentions it. There are times when he cannot help but show this, the fallout from a car accident four years ago, in which the car he was driving flipped and rolled, leaving Freeman and a friend to be pulled from the car using the Jaws of Life. Despite surgery to repair nerve damage, he was stuck with a useless left hand. It is stiffly gripped by a compression glove most of the time to ensure that blood doesn't pool there. It is a clamp, his pain, an icy shot up a relatively useless limb. He doesn't like to show it, but there are times when he cannot help but lose himself to a world-ending grimace. It's such a large gesture, so outside the general demeanor of the man, that it feels as if he's acting. 

"It's the fibromyalgia," he says when asked. "Up and down the arm. That's where it gets so bad. Excruciating." 

This means Morgan Freeman can't pilot jets the way he used to, a hobby he took up at sixty-five. He can no longer sail as well. There was a time when he would sail by himself to the Caribbean and hide out for two, three weeks at a time. "It was complete isolation," he says. "It was the best way for me to find quiet, how I found time to read." No more. He can't trust himself on one arm. He can't drive, not a stick anyway, not the way he used to — which is to say fast, wide open, dedicated to what the car can do. And he can't ride horses as much, though once he rode every day.

He never mentions any of it as a loss, though how could it be anything else? He never hints around about the unfairness of it. "There is a point to changes like these. I have to move on to other things, to other conceptions of myself. I play golf. I still work. And I can be pretty happy just walking the land."

My mom would have appreciated this revelation.