Gratitude

Gratitude gathers four short essays that Oliver Sacks wrote in the final months of his life. By then he knew his illness was terminal, and he used the time to look back on what he had lived through and to consider, plainly and without flinching, what it means to come to the end of a life.

Sacks was a physician and writer known for the way he paid attention to patients, and he turns that same attention on himself here. He reflects on his own place in the world and on the idea that each person is a unique individual who finds a particular path, lives a particular life and dies a particular death. The essays are personal and candid, and they move between sorrow and a steady sense of appreciation.

The feeling he returns to is gratitude. He writes that he loved and was loved, that he received a great deal and gave something back, and that simply being a thinking, feeling creature on this planet was a privilege and an adventure. The book is brief, but it offers a calm and generous way of looking at mortality, and it will appeal to readers of his earlier work as well as anyone thinking about how to face the end of a life.