Recently, as part of a documentary about his life for the BBC, actor and comedian Billy Connolly talked about being diagnosed with Parkinson’s and what it was like knowing that his “life is slipping away.” He described his apparently oncoming death as “an adventure,” saying it was “quite interesting” to see his “talents leave and attributes leave” and that he can’t hear, see, or remember things as well as he used to be able to. It was tragic and hopeful all at once, with Connolly approaching what he believed to be the end of his life with a surprising amount of optimism.
This weekend, though, Connolly’s wife Pamela Stephenson shared a video of him in which he suggests that he may have overstated the grimness of his condition in the documentary. In the video, Connolly’s is strumming on a banjo—something he noted that he had trouble doing these days in the documentary—and said, simply: “Not dying, not dead, not slipping away.” He also apologized if he “depressed” anyone and added, “maybe I should have phrased it better.”