Sacks from the Grave
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NEUROLOGIST and author Oliver Sacks died last August at the age of 82. He was widely read, and beloved, for his empathetic literary narratives illuminating the experiences of patients suffering from Tourette’s, aphasia, deafness, amnesia, autism, and other maladies. His focus was always on the individual’s resiliency rather than the hardships of an illness. In addition to thirteen books, his elegant thinking often appeared in medical journals, as well as in The New York Times, The New Yorker, and The New York Review of Books. Some of his writing was adapted for films, opera, and theater.

Sacks’ autobiography, On the Move, was published last year. In it, he spoke about his sexuality for the first time. When he was eighteen, he confided to his parents that he believed himself to be homosexual. His mother rebuked him with the charming words: “You are an abomination. I wish you had never been born.” He also shared stories from his youth and early adulthood, which included riding motorcycles, weightlifting, taking drugs, and a few gay love affairs. Then there followed a prolonged period of celibacy. But to Sacks’ surprise, after 35 years without love or sex, he found both with the writer Bill Hayes. Sacks was 77 years old at the time.

After submitting the final draft of the memoir to his publisher, Sacks learned that he had metastatic cancer, and that it was terminal. He then focused on a series of discursive essays reflecting upon the imminence of his death. These have now been posthumously published as Gratitude, in the manner of a spare, graceful coda to his beautifully rendered memoir.

Gratitude opens on a celebratory note, with Sacks “looking forward to being eighty.” But the mood shifts markedly in “My Own Life,” a piece written weeks after his diagnosis, in which he invokes “audacity, clarity, and plain speaking,” in order to “live in the richest, deepest, most productive way I can.” His prose here is simple but his sentiments profound, delivered with penetrating insight and admirable courage. Nevertheless, he admits: “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. … 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.”

“Sabbath,” written in his last month of life, revisits the author’s Jewish British upbringing, the rupture with his parents over his gayness, Sacks’ search for community and vocation, and ultimately “achieving a sense of peace within oneself.” He was relieved to complete his memoir and, “for the first time in my life, to make a full and frank declaration of my sexuality, facing the world openly, with no more guilty secrets locked up inside of me.”