My Own Life
Oliver Sacks on Learning He Has Terminal Cancer
By OLIVER SACKSFEB.
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 S