By OLIVER SACKS FEB. 19, 2015
Credit Hanna Barczyk
The Opinion Pages| Op-Ed Contributor
My Own Life
Oliver Sacks on Learning He Has Terminal Cancer
A MONTH ago, I felt that I was in good health, even robust health. At 81, I still swim a mile a day. But my luck has run out — a few weeks ago I learned that I have multiple metastases in the liver. Nine years ago it was discovered that I had a rare tumor of the eye, an ocular melanoma. Although the radiation and lasering to remove the tumor ultimately left me blind in that eye, only in very rare cases do such tumors metastasize. I am among the unlucky 2 percent.
I feel grateful that I have been granted nine years of good health and productivity since the original diagnosis, but now I am face to face with dying. The cancer occupies a third of my liver, and though its advance may be slowed, this particular sort of cancer cannot be halted.
It is up to me now to choose how to live out the months that remain to me. I have to live in the richest, deepest, most productive way I can. In this I am encouraged by the words of one of my favorite philosophers, David Hume, who, upon learning that he was mortally ill at age 65, wrote a short autobiography in a single day in April of 1776. He titled it “My Own Life.”
“I now reckon upon a speedy dissolution,” he wrote. “I have suffered very little pain from my disorder; and what is more strange, have, notwithstanding the great decline of my person, never suffered a moment’s abatement of my spirits. I possess the same ardour as ever in study, and the same gaiety in company.”
I have been lucky enough to live past 80, and the 15 years allotted to me beyond Hume’s three score and five have been equally rich in work and love. In that time, I have published five books and completed an autobiography (rather longer than Hume’s few pages) to be published this spring; I have several other books nearly finished.
Hume continued, “I am ... a man of mild dispositions, of command of temper, of an open, social, and cheerful humour, capable of attachment, but little susceptible of enmity, and of great moderation in all my passions.”
Here I depart from Hume. While I have enjoyed loving relationships and friendships and have no real enmities, I cannot say (nor would anyone who knows me say) that I am a man of mild dispositions. On the contrary, I am a man of vehement disposition, with violent enthusiasms, and extreme immoderation in all my passions.
And yet, one line from Hume’s essay strikes me as especially true: “It is difficult,” he wrote, “to be more detached from life than I am at present.”
Over the last few days, I have been able to see my life as from a great altitude, as a sort of landscape, and with a deepening sense of the connection of all its parts. This does not mean I am finished with life.
On the contrary, 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 feel a sudden clear focus and perspective. There is no time for anything inessential. I must focus on myself, my work and my friends. I shall no longer look at “NewsHour” every night. I shall no longer pay any attention to politics or arguments about global warming.
This is not indifference but detachment — I still care deeply about the Middle East, about global warming, about growing inequality, but these are no longer my business; they belong to the future. I rejoice when I meet gifted young people — even the one who biopsied and diagnosed my metastases. I feel the future is in good hands.
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.
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Oliver Sacks, a professor of neurology at the New York University School of Medicine, is the author of many books, including “Awakenings” and “The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat.”
A version of this op-ed appears in print on February 19, 2015, on page A25 of the New York edition with the headline: My Own Life.
Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/19/opinion/oliver-sacks-on-learning-he-has-terminal-cancer.html
Readers Respond: On ‘My Own Life’
The neurologist whose writing opened a popular window on a medical “awakening” of the human mind shared his personal awakening after receiving a terminal cancer diagnosis.
Readers responded to Oliver Sacks’ “My Own Life” with gratitude.
Readers responded to Oliver Sacks’ “My Own Life” with gratitude.
“I have been able to see my life as from a great altitude, as a sort of landscape, and with a deepening sense of the connection of all its parts,” Mr. Sacks wrote. “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.”
A science writer, a former medical student, the mother of a child with autism, a man on his “way out” and a man who, by chance, shared an airport lunch table with Mr. Sacks were among those who shared their own adventures of the mind.
At least one skeptic weighed in.
At least one skeptic weighed in.
As a young student engaged in the history of science, SAS from Newton, Mass., wrote, “your books inspired, delighted and amazed me. When I had a child, I would read passages out loud to my daughter, who is now studying to become a neuroscientist. Your words have become part of the fabric of our lives.”
Mr. Sacks wrote of an intense sense of purpose in his remaining days, familiar in the literature of death and dying. “I feel a sudden clear focus and perspective,” he wrote. “There is no time for anything inessential.”
Daily marvels took on shape in comments, too.
“Each morning I observe the sun as it begins its glorious show. I observe flowers as they open, and our fish as they wander our pond,” Richard Schmidt wrote from Concord, N.C. “I observe our grandchildren, as they change each day. All is wonder.”
One reader said Mr. Sacks’s recitation of books written and manuscripts pending seemed out of place. The neurologist’s joys and intensity, rather than inspire him, brought to mind the shortcomings in his own life.
“It is depressing because it highlights my own lack of human connections and significant accomplishments,,” A. Davey wrote from Portland. “How can those of us who have suffered from isolation and disappointment take any comfort or guidance from these words?”
A former medical student of Mr. Sacks’s described the imposing bearded figure of the onetime weight lifter riding a motorcycle through New York City, and illustrated the humor of his gentle mentor.
“On demonstrating the gag response on me, to which I didn’t gag, he remarked: ‘Either you are missing the response or being very polite,’” Donald Green of Reading, Mass., wrote of one lesson. “He respectfully introduced us to patients who were later portrayed in ‘Awakenings.’ It was eerie to have your memory jogged by a movie of something you had observed so closely years before.”
A reader with a terminal diagnosis of his own said reading Mr. Sacks’s work, he “learned about migraine; mysterious, Parkinsonian sleep; your British Jewish family; hallucination; music; and, above all, human idiosyncrasy,” G wrote from Virginia. “Your voice is clear and kind and, as I like to think, has inspired kindness in my own soul.”
A mother whose child has autism and “a brilliant, very alive mind” wrote to appreciate Mr. Sacks “for helping open minds to all of the wonderful human possibility expressed in the idea of neurodiversity.”
A New Yorker recounted a time at a California airport when an older man asked to sit at his table as they awaited their plane to the city. “As he sat quietly, eating his chicken noodle soup and crackers, I couldn’t help but notice that he looked familiar,” wrote Phillip from New York City, who realized eventually that he was sitting with the best-selling author. “Fortunately, I was prepared, having just finished reading ‘An Anthropologist on Mars’ and ‘Uncle Tungsten.’ … He even gave me a sneak preview of his forthcoming book on music.”
Mr. Sacks wrote that watching his generation fade out has pained him.
“Each death I have felt as an abruption, a tearing away of part of myself,” he wrote. “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.”
Despite the pending abruption, some readers said Mr. Sacks’ life will continue to inspire imagination.
“I heard something at a friend’s funeral not too long ago about immortality — that we do live forever, and not just as memories,”Elizabeth Fuller wrote from Peterborough, N.H. “What we have done, said, and written lives on in ways big and small, often subconsciously, in those whose lives we have touched.”
Source: http://op-talk.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/02/23/readers-respond-on-my-own-life/?emc=edit_ty_20150224&nl=opinion&nlid=59725256&_r=0
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