Author Oliver Sacks has just discovered that he has a terminal form of liver cancer.
The 81 year-old author revealed the news in an heart felt piece in The New York Times. With so little time left, Sacks is inspired to make the most of the limited time he has left. “I have to live in the richest, deepest, most productive way I can,” he wrote, explaining his inspiration from philosopher David Hume, who wrote a short autobiography in a day after receiving similar news.
Here is more from Sacks’ piece:
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.