The polymathic neurologist, whose books, research, and clinical insights have helped countless people understand the deep and abiding mysteries of the human mind, announced the sad news in today's New York Times:
A MONTH ago, I felt that I was in good health, even robust health. At 81, I still swim a mile a day. But my luck has run out — a few weeks ago I learned that I have multiple metastases in the liver. Nine years ago it was discovered that I had a rare tumor of the eye, an ocular melanoma. Although the radiation and lasering to remove the tumor ultimately left me blind in that eye, only in very rare cases do such tumors metastasize. I am among the unlucky 2 percent.
I have followed his career for decades, returning over and over to the compassionate and curious voice of a scientist with endless reserves of love and kindness who wrote so eloquently about his experiences in such books as "Awakenings," "The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat," and "An Anthropologist On Mars."
Writing about his diagnosis and what it means, Sacks continues to be himself: unapolgetically erudite, wittty, thoughtful, and optimistic.
I still care deeply about the Middle East, about global warming, about growing inequality, but these are no longer my business; they belong to the future. I rejoice when I meet gifted young people — even the one who biopsied and diagnosed my metastases. I feel the future is in good hands.
I have been increasingly conscious, for the last 10 years or so, of deaths among my contemporaries. My generation is on the way out, and 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. They leave holes that cannot be filled, for it is the fate — the genetic and neural fate — of every human being to be a unique individual, to find his own path, to live his own life, to die his own death.
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.
May this good and brilliant man accomplish his transition back to stardust with the dignity, grace, and courage that have marked his many decades of productive life on Earth.
That's all I've got right now.