A friend just posted a piece on FaceBook from the Opinion Page of the New Times, published 2/19/2015 by Oliver Sacks. Here is the title --

My Own Life
Oliver Sacks on Learning He Has Terminal Cancer

Over the years I have so enjoyed listening to and reading Oliver Sacks. Such a curious man and I mean that both ways. What a loss it will be to loose him. Here is the end of his piece. Professionally I work with the elderly, the first sentiment expressed in the excerpt is such an astute description what I hear from my clients. The second observation of each person's uniqueness sometimes sounds trite, we hear it so often. Unfortunately it is not until we are faced with loosing or have lost someone that we know all the way to the bone that this is as true a statement as can be made.


I have been increasingly conscious, for the last 10 years or so, of deaths among my contemporaries. My generation is on the way out, and each death I have felt as an abruption, a tearing away of part of myself. There will be no one like us when we are gone, but then there is no one like anyone else, ever. 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. I have loved and been loved; I have been given much and I have given something in return; I have read and traveled and thought and written. I have had an intercourse with the world, the special intercourse of writers and readers.

Above all, I have been a sentient being, a thinking animal, on this beautiful planet, and that in itself has been an enormous privilege and adventure.

There was a boy
A very strange enchanted boy
They say he wandered very far
Very far, over land and sea

A little shy and sad of eye
But very wise was he

And then one day, a magic day
He passed my way, and while we spoke
Of many things, fools and kings
This he said to me

"The greatest thing you'll ever learn
Is just to love and be loved in return"

"The greatest thing you'll ever learn
Is just to love and be loved in return"