![]() ![]() ![]() I have been increasingly conscious, for the last 10 years or so, of deaths among my contemporaries. Sacks peers into the depths of existence from the bittersweet platform of a long and, suddenly, immediately finite life: ![]() Oliver Sacks by Bill HayesĪfter learning of his terminal diagnosis, the irreplaceable Dr. Sacks’s warm wisdom on the measure of living and the dignity of dying, edited by his partner, the writer and photographer Bill Hayes, and his friend and assistant of thirty years, Kate Edgar. He confronted death directly, with courageous curiosity and radiant lucidity, in one of his New York Times essays posthumously collected in the small, enormously life-affirming book Gratitude ( public library) - that great parting gift which gave us Dr. I am yet to encounter a human being who embodied and enacted these difficult truths more wholeheartedly than Oliver Sacks (July 9, 1933–August 30, 2015). ![]() “The greatest dignity to be found in death is the dignity of the life that preceded it,” the late surgeon and bioethicist Sherwin Nuland wrote half a millennium later in his foundational treatise on mortality. “To lament that we shall not be alive a hundred years hence, is the same folly as to be sorry we were not alive a hundred years ago,” Montaigne observed in his sixteenth-century meditation on death and the art of living. ![]()
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