Oliver Sacks – Write as if you knew your death date

I’ve become obsessed with the writings and lectures of Dr. Oliver Sacks. Not only was the man absolutely delightful – he had a sense of humor that often causes me chuckle through the lines of his essays and books – he was one of our greatest minds and a break-your-heart beautiful writer.

Sacks, a British neurologist and author, had an insatiable curiosity at what his website describes as “the far borderlands of neurological experience”. Through his writings for the general public, Sacks described for us conditions such as Tourette’s syndrome, Parkinsonism, migraines and musical hallucinations, phantom limb syndrome, schizophrenia, and Alzheimer’s disease. He explored what it meant to be a conscious individual and how our brains make us who we are. Dr. Sacks wrote and lectured about these things so we could understand them, infecting his audience with that same sense of awe one might experience when learning something new about the universe. 

Writing case histories, where he described the challenges and the unique gifts of his patients, he did not leave himself out of his explorations. Sacks was afflicted with prosopagnosia, or what is called face blindness. This meant he was not only unable to recognize friends and family by their faces, but he was also unable to recognize himself in a mirror or a window. He wrote a fun piece for The New Yorker on the subject. In addition to writing humorously about not being able to recognize himself (or the street where he lived), Sacks made no secret of the fact that he also experimented with drugs in the 60s and once explained that he had quite a fascination with the color Indigo.

“I had been reading about the color indigo, how it had been introduced into the spectrum by [Isaac] Newton rather late, and it seemed no two people quite agreed as to what indigo was, and I thought I would like to have an experience of indigo. And I built up a sort of pharmacological launchpad with amphetamines and LSD, and a little cannabis on top of that, and when I was really stoned I said, ‘I want to see indigo now.’ And as if thrown by a paintbrush, a huge pear-shaped blob of the purest indigo appeared on the wall.” – Interview with NPR’s Fresh Air.

One of my favorite essays, first published in the New York Times, is Mishearings – an essay about the sentences and words one might mistakenly experience with the onset of deafness.

“Only in the realm of mishearing — at least, my mishearings — can a biography of cancer become a biography of Cantor (one of my favorite mathematicians), tarot cards turn into pteropods, a grocery bag into a poetry bag, all-or-noneness into oral numbness, a porch into a Porsche, and a mere mention of Christmas Eve a command to “Kiss my feet!”

So, in my attempts at learning everything Sacks, and the pursuant reason for this post, I listened to a podcast on RadioLab – WNYC which featured recorded audio files of conversations between Sacks and his partner Bill Hayes during the last months of Sacks’ life. Sacks was diagnosed with cancer in January 2015 which had originated years earlier as a melanoma in his eye but had then spread to his liver. He was given only months to live. For me, as well as the hosts of that podcast, the remarkable thing about these audio files is that they share Sacks in the realm of his thinking process as he wrote.

Often whispering and talking out loud to himself as he penned his essays, I listened to what sometimes appeared to be the man speaking to his muse as he searched for the proper, the absolute proper, word to use.

Sacks was prolific and at the end of his life his focus and concentration only intensified. He scratched off pages of writings and plowed through numerous ink cartridges (he wrote by hand with a fountain pen) as he worked to get his thoughts on paper. As Hayes explained during the RadioLab interview, Sacks’ immediate response to his prognosis was to write. This got me to thinking, what would I write if I knew the date of my death? What would you write? What would you paint? Create? And would we need to be given a death sentence to do so?

Dr. Oliver Sacks passed away from cancer on August 30 2015 at his home in Manhattan NYC at the age of 82. He was given the title of “The Poet Laureate of Medicine” by the New York Times and he gave us such books as “The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat”, “Gratitude”, and posthumously (compiled by the musings captured in Hayes’ audio files) “The River of Consciousness”. His work was adapted for film in the 1990 movie with Robin Williams and Robert De Niro, entitled “Awakenings”. His many essays were published by the New York Times, The New Yorker, The Atlantic and many more to numerous to mention. You can listen to his lecture on “What Hallucinations Reveal About Our Minds” on TED.

Lisa Mikulski is an international writer and photographer based in Boston, MA. Available for print or online publications. Editorial, features, content development, and creative. Contact me and let’s write your story.