The mother of my daughter-in-law and dear friend, Joani Mendelson, gave me a wonderful little book called Gratitude. It’s a slim volume of four essays written by a neuroscientist, Oliver Sacks, who had reached the age of 80, knowing that he had terminal cancer. I was 78 when I received the book. This past week, I turned 80 myself.
Oliver Sacks said many things which I feel, though I could never express them in the eloquent language he used.
“At 80, the specter of dementia or stroke looms. A third of one’s contemporaries are dead and many more, with profound mental or physical damage, are trapped in a tragic and minimal existence. The marks of decay are all too visible. One’s reactions are a little slower. (Particularly noticeable for me, walking on the beach and seeing people walk briskly past me!) Names more frequently elude one, and one’s energies must be husbanded, but even so, one may often feel full of energy and life and not at all ‘old.’” (How well that, particularly the last sentence, describes my feelings especially when I am with my children and grandchildren in a place like Pointe au Baril, where we are now.)
Sacks describes what his father, who lived to 94, often said to him. He expressed a feeling, as Sacks writes, that he’s “begun to feel, not a shrinking but an enlargement of mental life and perspective. One has a long experience of life, not only one’s own life, but others, too. One has seen triumphs and tragedies, booms and busts, revolutions and wars, great achievements and deep ambiguities. One has seen grand theories rise, only to be toppled by stubborn facts. One is more conscious of transience and, perhaps, of beauty.” (Yes, indeed, above all of beauty.)
“At 80, one can take long view and have a vivid, live sense of history not possible at an earlier age. 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 together.”
Sacks, in other short essays, 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 it, 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 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.”
“This will involve audacity, clarity and, in plain speaking, trying to straighten my accounts with the world. But there will be time, too, for some fun (and even some silliness as well).”
“I feel a sudden clear focus and perspective. There is no time for anything inessential. I must focus on myself, my work and my friends.” (For me, particularly, focus on Francie and my family and, yes, my relationships with those closest to me.)
“I shall no longer look at the ‘news hour’ every night. This is no indifference but detachment—I still care deeply about the Middle East, about global warming, about growing inequality—but they are no longer my business; they belong to the future.” (I don’t quite go that far; but I do remind myself to concentrate on the essential FEW.)
And in continuing, “I have been increasingly conscious of deaths among my contemporaries. Each death I have felt as an abruption, a tearing away of part of myself. There will be no one like us when we are gone, but then, there is no one like anyone else, ever. When people die, they cannot be replaced.”
“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.”
Yes, gratitude, that is my predominant feeling. It is no mistake that a prayer, which I never forget to say to God when I am in church, is a prayer of thanksgiving for all the blessings that He has given me, above all in my family.
*****
Thank you, John, for continuing to lead us so thoughtfully. Marc Krass
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