Oliver Sacks on Gratitude and Death

I’m a great fan of Oliver Sacks. If you don’t know him, he’s probably the most famous neurologist alive and written dozens of amazing books.

From NY Mag:

“Sacks has now spent 50 years attending to patients damaged in ways that make it difficult for others, even doctors, to acknowledge their full personhood—those with Tourette’s, Asperger’s, the deaf, the blind, the hallucinatory and the self-disassociated. But perhaps his profoundest work has been with a population that goes nearly unnamed in his writing, though it supplies so many of the cases he writes about—and of which he himself is now, finally, truly a part. Neurological function declines over time, and many of the patients experiencing the most fantastical neurological symptoms are those typically dismissed, simply, as demented. Even as Sacks ages into the ranks of the very old, a remarkable number of his patients are older still than him; many of them approaching 100, birthdays he roots for. Often they persevere in the lonely carrels of nursing homes, navigating lives distorted by brain dysfunction in ways they’re terrified to acknowledge, worried they’ll be written off by physicians less sensitive than Sacks. He is like a village doctor, and the village is old age.”

Unfortunately, age has caught up with him and he is now suffering from multiple metastases in the liver. Sacks penned an essay in the NYT. It was beautiful. An excerpt below:

I feel intensely alive, and I want and hope in the time that remains to deepen my friendships, to say farewell to those I love, to write more, to travel if I have the strength, to achieve new levels of understanding and insight.

This will involve audacity, clarity and plain speaking; trying to straighten my accounts with the world. But there will be time, too, for some fun (and even some silliness, as well).

I have been increasingly conscious, for the last 10 years or so, of deaths among my contemporaries. My generation is on the way out, and each death I have felt as an abruption, a tearing away of part of myself. There will be no one like us when we are gone, but then there is no one like anyone else, ever. When people die, they cannot be replaced. They leave holes that cannot be filled, for it is the fate — the genetic and neural fate — of every human being to be a unique individual, to find his own path, to live his own life, to die his own death.

I cannot pretend I am without fear. But my predominant feeling is one of gratitude. I have loved and been loved; I have been given much and I have given something in return; I have read and traveled and thought and written. I have had an intercourse with the world, the special intercourse of writers and readers.

Above all, I have been a sentient being, a thinking animal, on this beautiful planet, and that in itself has been an enormous privilege and adventure.

I hope I have I have time to accomplish a tiny bit of what he did and the the ability accept the end with the same grace.