"If you put your mind to it," said Dr. Emmett L. Brown, "you can accomplish anything."

The night before my L.A. Marathon run in March, I replayed my recording of Fox's interview that day. I think that day was the one I decided I was ready to be an activist. Because I went to hear Joel Feldman of End Distracted Driving give a talk to high school students the first time that same week. Fox said about his work to raise Parkinson's awareness that day that everything changed the moment he realized he only had to give this work a certain amount of space in his life. That it didn't have to take over everything.

Until I'd figured out the certain amount of space my grief and anger over my father's death needed to take up, it bled unpredictably into everything I did.

The day the issue of GH with my story in it appeared on newsstands a week later, my cousin Jenn texted me when I was on my way home. She wrote, "Look what's on TV" and pasted a photo of Marty in the Van Halen scene. "This is the scene it was on when we turned to it."

Granted, Back to the Future is on channels like TNT ad nauseam, so this isn't that strange of a situation. But what was strange was that this one scene kept popping up in my life, like it wanted me to take notice of it. I knew I had to talk to Gabe Hurley about this, so I messaged him on Facebook (he uses voice to text). He told me he wasn't surprised by the synchronicities at all.

"I told you the first movie I watched after I woke up from my car crash, right?" he asked me. I told him that no, he hadn't. "It was Back to the Future," he said. "It was the only film I could still enjoy just as much only listening to it."