Gratitude

“My predominant feeling is one in every of gratitude. I’ve cherished and been cherished. I’ve been given a lot and I’ve given one thing in return. Above all, I’ve been a sentient being, a pondering animal, on this lovely planet, and that in itself has been an infinite privilege and journey.”
—Oliver Sacks

No author has succeeded in capturing the medical and human drama of sickness as actually and as eloquently as Oliver Sacks. 

Throughout the previous couple of months of his life, he wrote a set of essays by which he movingly explored his emotions about finishing a life and coming to phrases along with his personal demise.

“It’s the destiny of each human being,” Sacks writes, “to be a singular particular person, to seek out his personal path, to dwell his personal life, to die his personal demise.”

Collectively, these 4 essays kind an ode to the individuality of every human being and to gratitude for the present of life.

“Oliver Sacks was like no different clinician, or author. He was drawn to the houses of the sick, the establishments of probably the most frail and disabled, the firm of the weird and the ‘irregular.’ He needed to see humanity in its many variants and to take action in his personal, virtually anachronistic method—nose to nose, over time, away from our burgeoning equipment of computer systems and algorithms. And, by way of his writing, he confirmed us what he noticed.”
—Atul Gawande, writer of Being Mortal