Gratitude

by Oliver Sacks

Eighty! I can hardly believe it. I often feel that life is about to begin, only to realize it is almost over.

I was assailed by memories, both good and bad. Most were in a mode of gratitude—gratitude

“I’m glad I’m not dead!” sometimes bursts out of me when the weather is perfect.

am sorry I have wasted (and still waste) so much time; I am sorry to be as agonizingly shy at eighty as I was at twenty; I am sorry that I speak no languages but my mother tongue and that I have not traveled or experienced other cultures as widely as I should have done.

Perhaps, with luck, I will make it, more or less intact, for another few years and be granted the liberty to continue to love and work, the two most important things, Freud insisted, in life.

My father, who lived to ninety-four, often said that the eighties had been one of the most enjoyable decades of his life.

This is not indifference but detachment—I

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.

He was full of entertaining stories about the Nobel Prize and the ceremony in Stockholm, but made a point of saying that, had he been compelled to travel to Stockholm on a Saturday, he would have refused the prize.