To the family of the former N.H.L. player Jeff Parker, the posthumous diagnosis of C.T.E., or chronic traumatic encephalopathy, was the predictable conclusion. All those hits to the head, including that final one that knocked him out of the game altogether, and all those subsequent years of struggle? In the final, difficult years before Parker’s death last September at age 53, the family figured that it must be C.T.E.
“It just makes me sad,” John Parker, Jeff’s younger brother, said through tears. “It doesn’t bring him back. It just makes you feel sad, that he was living with this, and it’s a thing.