No more evening news or politics: How Oliver Sacks wants to live his last few days

Neuroscientist Oliver Sacks was healthy  a month ago and swimming a mile a day just because he could. Sadly, everything changed for him soon enough and the 81-year-old found out he had terminal liver cancer, with maybe months to live. Oliver Sacks is the author of several books about unusual medical conditions including The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Awakenings. The latter was based on his work with patients treated with a drug that woke them up after years in a catatonic state. It was later made ion to a movie and the 1991 film version, starring Robert De Niro and Robin Williams, was nominated for three Oscars including best picture. In a beautiful op-ed, published in the _New York Time_s, he describes his state of mind and how he’ll face his final moments of death. A question many struggle to come to terms with when faced with death. [caption id=“attachment_2111929” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]  Oliver Sacks on a motorcycle in 1961. Twitter[/caption] Oliver Sacks, however, is not the first person to contemplate about life after death and is not the first to wage a public war with a terminal disease. His essay crushes the invincible barrier we humans create for ourselves and maybe makes us realise we are vanquishable. Like Oliver Sacks, many have used their upcoming death as a way to choose how to live out the months that remain and to quote him “to live in the richest, deepest and most productive way they can.” When the Pulitzer Prize-winning humorist Art Buchwald took himself off of dialysis for kidney failure in 2006, doctors gave him weeks to live, and he ended up living for 11 months and made it a point to eat a one profiterole and a banana split for every chocolate eclair he had shunned earlier in life. Apple co-founder Steve Jobs died after a seven-year battle with pancreatic cancer on 5 October in 2011. Following his 2004 diagnosis, the CEO often contemplated on his condition, famously in a 2005 commencement speech at Stanford. Where he said: “Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose… Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.” But not everyone is as agreeable as Sacks or Jobs when it comes to their time of death. Sci-fi author Terry Prachett, who has been living with the slow onset of Alzheimer’s since 2007, has vehemently expressed his opinion in the Guardian that those with incurable illnesses should be allowed to choose how and when they die. For anyone who has seen a family member or a friend suffering in a hospital bed,with nothing of their old self left behind, you tend to understand Terry Prachett’s argument for euthanasia. Rather than let him be defeated by his alzheimer’s prognosis  he vowed that he would  rather live his life  to the full and die in his own home before the disease got too severe. Preferably  in a chair on the lawn, with a brandy in his hand to wash down the painkillers that could be supplied by some ­helpful medic. And not everyone sees life through the rose-tinted glasses of near death. Christopher Hitchens the author of Hitch-22 was on a book tour for his memoir when he was diagnosed with esophageal cancer. He wrote a Vanity Fair essay, “Topic of Cancer,” while undergoing treatment talking about the sheer powerlessness of a terminal disease. “Allow me to inform you, though, that when you sit in a room with a set of other finalists, and kindly people bring a huge transparent bag of poison and plug it into your arm, and you either read or don’t read a book while the venom sack gradually empties itself into your system, the image of the ardent soldier or revolutionary is the very last one that will occur to you. You feel swamped with passivity and impotence: dissolving in powerlessness like a sugar lump in water.” Faced with his eventual death Sacks said he would no longer watch the evening news, or pay attention to arguments over politics or climate change. “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,” he wrote. A future sadly he will not be a part of.