Gratitude (Oliver Sacks)
“Gratitude” is a collection of four essays written by the famous clinician Oliver Sacks at the end of his life. They explore his feelings on aging, coming to terms with death, and his profound gratitude for life. This slim volume is only 45 pages, but full of beautiful sentiments, and proves that one can face death with appreciation and love.
Here are my favourite bits, pieced together.
I have no belief in (or desire for) any postmortem existence, other than in the memories of friends and the hope that some of my books may still “speak” to people after my death. . . I do not think of old age as an ever grimmer time that one must somehow endure and make the best of, but as a time of leisure and freedom, freed from the factitious urgencies of earlier days, free to explore whatever I wish, and to bind the thoughts and feelings of a lifetime. . . 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. . . 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. . . 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.