On this day four years ago – September 10, 2021 – Kevin Atkinson went to the doctor for a routine check-up and walked out with a diagnosis that he had five to seven years to live.

Not that he believed it, of course.

Atkinson sauntered out of that UT Southwestern Hospital just like he prowled the sidelines of a Flower Mound Marcus football game when he was peeved at an official. That neurologist had no idea what he was talking about.

Sure, Atkinson knew something was wrong. For three years, he’d slowly, inexplicably, lost his ability to talk. His words first slowed, then slurred, lagging farther behind the rapid pace of his brain with each passing day.

Atkinson had been given so many different answers in the desperate search for why. First it was that he’d suffered a mini stroke. Then it was Parkinson’s. Those were hard to hear, but acceptable. This latest answer was not. Kevin Atkinson had Progressive supranuclear palsy (PSP), a degenerative brain disease.

The neurologist had told him there was no cure. All Atkinson could do was live his best life for whatever was left of it. So, maybe it was perfect timing that Marcus had a district game against Keller Central that night. Atkinson could do what he had always done best, pouring into high school kids without thinking about himself. Except tonight, that selfless act would be a little selfish. Because the pregame speeches, the perfect play call against that one defensive formation, and the decision on whether or not to use that final timeout could distract him – even just for three hours – from the fact that this doctor believed he was going to die soon.

Maybe Kevin could immerse himself in the game, but his wife, Chrissy, couldn’t. She and her three kids had never missed a game. Both of her daughters cheered for his team, and her son played quarterback. She thought she had experienced every emotion that a Friday night could bring, until that night.

“It was like I was in a bubble; I was underwater,” Chrissy said. “I could hear everybody complaining about their day. And I just thought, ‘You don’t even know.’ I couldn’t say anything to anybody.”

PSP is a horrible disease. All it does is take. As it progresses, it kills more of your brain’s most vital nerve cells, systematically robbing you of all your physical capabilities, like going down a cruel checklist. First, your ability to talk. Then to walk. Then to chew. Frankly, it takes away your life long before it stops your heart.

But of all the things this wretched illness takes, the Atkinson family has found that one of the most painful things it ripped away was their community. Because PSP isn’t just evil; it’s anonymous. When Chrissy tells people that Kevin has PSP, they’ll react with a polite, “Oh, I’m sorry,’ as if he has the flu – the default response when someone says they have a medical condition you’ve never heard of. The doctors at the nearby urgent care don’t even know what PSP is when Chrissy has to take Kevin in after a fall.

So that underwater feeling that Chrissy had on Night One has not left her. With each day, the Atkinson family is pulled deeper and deeper below the surface, silently drowning while everyone else wonders, ‘Whatever happened to that awesome head coach from Flower Mound Marcus? You know, the one who coached Garrett Nussmeier? Wasn’t it a stroke? Parkinson’s?’

For a while, the family’s well-deserved privacy created a disconnect between what people thought was happening and what they were actually going through. At first, they didn’t even want to believe it themselves. Google told them PSP developed in 70-year-olds, and Kevin was only 52. The neurologist said it came with all these symptoms – like falling and choking – that Kevin showed no sign of. But as the disease has progressed, and all these symptoms the neurologist warned of have unfolded like a painful prophecy, the Atkinsons are determined to not let PSP take their father away quietly, like it’s done to so many others.

“I want people to realize exactly what he’s going through and to bring awareness to the disease,” Chrissy said.

These days, Kevin Atkinson sits in a special chair in front of the TV from the moment he wakes up to the moment he goes to sleep. The bruises pockmarking his body are evidence of why he can’t do much else. He falls almost every time he tries to get up on his own. His wife has to help him shower and use the bathroom. His youngest daughter, Abby, brushes his teeth for him and shaves his face. The closest he can get to a meal is gummy pasta because he’ll choke on everything else.

But of all the things Kevin can’t do anymore, the thing his wife and children miss most is his voice. He used to give the best advice. Every morning, he dropped his kids off at school before going into the office, leaving them with the same reminder before peeling out of the carpool line.

“Hey,” he’d call out to them, ducking his head so he could see them out of the car. “Stay tough, be a leader, and remember, you’re an Atkinson. People notice you.”

Now, his kids are walking into some of the most important phases of their lives, and they’re looking back at the car, at their dad, for a word of encouragement that can’t come. His oldest daughter, Lexi, yearns for it as a new mom to a three-month-old baby. His only son, Colton, recently married, wishes he could ask him about how to set a good foundation for his marriage. His youngest daughter, Abby, who graduated from Texas Tech in 2025, wants to know how he navigated life after graduation.

“I think that my siblings and I feel like we’re just missing out on so much wisdom – so many things that he would love to be sharing and pouring into us,” Lexi said.

And the hardest part is that his kids know he still has that advice in him. Because for everything that PSP has taken from Kevin Atkinson, it hasn’t touched his thoughts or memory. His piercing blue eyes are a window to a soul that’s still there. He knows exactly what each child needs to hear, but he can only try communicating it with a thumbs-up or thumbs-down. So, most of the time, that advice stays rattling inside his mind, trapped inside a body that doesn’t work anymore.

In that gap between what Kevin can express and what his family can understand, his wife and children are left to wonder what he’s thinking and how much he’s suffering. So, every day they wake up with conflicting emotions: thankful for another day with their dad, and heartbroken that he has to spend another day in pain. 

“It’s hard to see a man that was so strong and so full of life… just for it to be taken away from him,” Chrissy said. “It’s like the longest, hardest goodbye.”

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