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.
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.”
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