Diane Hastings’ poise was the first thing that most people noticed about her. Glamorous and calm, she was the type of person who could enter a space and seem completely comfortable. This is why the diagnosis was so confusing for everyone around her, not just for her. She was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease in 2003 at the age of 39. 65 is the average age at diagnosis. In no way would Diane have chosen to be decades ahead of the curve.
It began with a minor, nearly insignificant thing. Her left hand trembled a little. She couldn’t quite put her finger on the stiffness in one shoulder. When she was writing Christmas cards in late 2002, she recalls her hand not keeping up with her thoughts, causing the pen to lag what her mind was trying to say. She blamed stress at the time because the family had temporarily moved to Gullane, East Lothian, while constructing an addition to their Murrayfield home, and she thought the weariness was situational because they had two small children, Holly and Adam. At first, her doctor believed it to be depression. Diane then brought up the tremor. She was walking down the hallway when a neurologist at Edinburgh’s Western General Hospital noticed that she had Parkinson’s almost immediately.
Gavin was covering the 2003 Rugby World Cup while he was in Australia. The news from the other side of the globe had to be called to him by Diane. “I went into shock,” he said afterwards. “Our lives were going so well.” He desired to take a plane back home. She warned him against it. That brief, pragmatic, and quietly terrifying exchange reveals a lot about how the Hastings family would approach the years to come: with an unsentimental resolve that doesn’t ignore the challenges but refuses to let them define them.
Over the years, Diane has candidly and disarmingly detailed the long list of humiliations that come with having Parkinson’s. the sudden, involuntary movements known as dyskinesia. The fidgeting that attracts attention in stores and supermarkets is a side effect of medication. Her friends started making jokes about her propensity for compulsive shopping, which was one of the more peculiar side effects of the medication. “I’ll phone them and say I’ve bought a really nice jacket,” she once told me, “and they’ll say, ‘Is it the pills?'” The Hastings family has a gallows humor that feels genuinely earned rather than put on for the general public.
For his part, Gavin discreetly rearranged his life to focus on providing care. He started working from home. He observed Diane hiding her symptoms in public by timing outings around her morning medication, when her symptoms were most tolerable, and sitting on her hands to stop trembling. Walking every day helped the couple deal with the stiffness and rigidity brought on by Parkinson’s disease, so they purchased a chocolate Labrador named Mara and later added a black Lab named Milo. The architecture of a life rebuilt around a body that refuses to cooperate is the little, lived details of chronic illness that seldom make headlines.
Deep-brain stimulation surgery was the game-changer, at least in terms of medicine. Diane’s tremors and dyskinesia significantly decreased after the procedure, which entails implanting electrodes to control aberrant brain signals. In 2018, she ran the London Marathon for Parkinson’s UK, a decision that would have seemed unattainable during her darkest years. She later described it as a life-changing experience. To raise over £50,000 for Parkinson’s research, Gavin had already climbed Mount Kilimanjaro in 2012. He timed the summit to fall on Muhammad Ali’s 70th birthday, who is arguably the most well-known Parkinson’s patient in the world.
The texture of how a family absorbs something like this, rather than just the medical facts, is what keeps the Hastings story compelling. Eventually, Gavin and Diane shared the diagnosis with Adam and Holly at their Edinburgh kitchen table. Gavin was scared. As usual, Diane made it seem doable. In response, Adam questioned why his mother never sat motionless on the couch. Since then, additional tragedies have affected the family’s larger narrative: Gavin’s brother Scott lost his wife Jenny to depression in 2024, and Scott himself passed away in May 2026 due to complications from cancer. The Hastings name may now be more associated with the family’s struggles off the field than with their accomplishments on it. From the outside, it seems like Diane’s quiet perseverance set the tone for everything.
