Oliver Sacks, New York City, 2000
With a deep sigh, I woke up yesterday to the news of Oliver Sacks’ passing. Like many who had read his riveting OpEd [1] about his terminal illness, we knew this was coming. I’d become familiar with his work through pieces in The New Yorker, but it was fascinating to recently learn about his personal life. He was a closeted gay man who didn’t publically come out until this year. I particularly loved this detail shared by the Times [2] that after 35 years of celibacy and “at a certain distance from life,” Dr. Sacks writes about unexpectedly falling in love — “(for God’s sake!) I was in my 77th year” – which required giving up “the habits of a lifetime’s solitude,” like decades of meals that consisted mostly of cereal or sardines, eaten “out of the tin, standing up, in 30 seconds.”