The Way Oliver Sacks Announced His Terminal Cancer Will Make You Think Differently About Death
Oliver Sacks speaks at Columbia University in June 2009. (Photo: Getty Images)
In an op-ed in The New York Times that was published Thursday morning, renowned neurologist and author Oliver Sacks announced that he has terminal liver cancer and has been given just months left to live.
Sacks authored the 1973 book Awakenings, which detailed his real-life experience with patients who suffered from a condition known as encephalitis lethargica, and how they were able to exit — however briefly — from their catatonic states with the aid of a drug.
The story was adapted into a 1990 Oscar-nominated film of the same name starring Robin Williams and Robert DeNiro. Sacks also authored The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat and An Anthropologist on Mars in addition to many other books and countless articles and essays.
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"A month ago, I felt that I was in good health, even robust health," he wrote. "But my luck has run out — a few weeks ago I learned that I have multiple metastases in the liver."
True to form, Sacks, who is 81 years old, writes about learning of his diagnosis and his thoughts on death — and life — with profound eloquence and nuance. Dr. Sacks writes:
“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. … 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.”
In the hours since Sacks’s essay has gone live, public and private figures alike have taken to social media to discuss how Sacks’s work has had an impact on them — and the way this most recent piece of writing in particular has proved to be especially inspiring.
John Green, author of the pop-culture phenomenon and young-adult novel turned movie The Fault in Our Stars, itself a work about teens with terminal cancer, tweeted:
Actress Olivia Wilde also took to Twitter to react to the announcement, saying:
And musician and performer Josh Groban tweeted:
Kai Ryssdal, the host of public radio’s Marketplace, simply said:
On Tuesday, Sacks himself wrote his most recent tweet, saying “Want to learn more about my upcoming memoir, On The Move? Read my latest newsletter at oliversacks.com/blog/.” As he mentions in his op-ed today, even in the face of death, Sacks feels an urgency to keep working and to finish the outstanding manuscripts he has begun.
On Valentine’s Day, the site Boing-Boing posted a teaser for Sacks’s forthcoming memoir, out in April, including the cover photo which depicts the young Sacks on a motorcycle in New York City in the early 1960’s. In the introduction to a 2012 podcast Sacks recorded for Boing-Boing, Mark Frauenfelder writes, “Dr. Sacks’ books are fascinating explorations into the way the human mind works, usually through studying abnormal minds and surprising ways in which they give us clues about perception, consciousness, and behavior” adding that “Dr. Sacks himself has face blindness, Asperger’s syndrome, is blind in one eye, and is slightly deaf.”
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Perhaps it is Sacks’ own sensitivity toward — and celebration of — difference, the things that could so easily make individuals feel “other” or excluded, but instead become touch-points for celebrating the commonalities that qualify the intrinsically human experience, that has made his work resonate so deeply with so many.
Sacks’ concludes his op-ed with words that are specifically about his own experience but could easily describe the most universal of personal yearnings:
“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.”
With additional reporting by the AFP.
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