Somewhere in the country, well beyond the reach of city lights, an old man looks up and sees the entire sky dusted with stars, the way he had imagined it could only look from a high desert plateau in Chile. It is the sight, he writes, that finally made him understand how little time he had left. He tells two friends that he would like to see a sky like that again when he is dying, and they answer simply that they will wheel him outside. Hundreds of kind letters had reached him since his diagnosis, and he was grateful for every one. None of them, he admits, struck him as hard as that night. Of everything in Gratitude by Oliver Sacks, that sky may be the image that stays longest.
The moment comes from the third of four pieces in a slim volume of newspaper essays published in late 2015, a few months after the neurologist died. The scene also explains something about him. Since he was six, sent away from wartime London to a boarding school, Sacks had dealt with loss by turning towards the nonhuman: first to numbers, then, back home at ten, to the elements. Facing death, he does it again, and the effect is calm rather than cold.
Old Age as a Holiday
The earliest essay was written just before his eightieth birthday, before any diagnosis, and its mood is almost buoyant. Sacks remembers that his father, who lived to ninety-four, called his eighties among the happiest years of his life. He hopes to go the way Francis Crick did, still working on his most ambitious ideas when the end came, and recalls W. H. Auden insisting that a birthday must always be celebrated, however one feels. The piece ends with him declaring that he is looking forward to the decade. In Gratitude by Oliver Sacks, that cheerfulness is set up early so that it can be tested.
It is tested within eighteen months. The second piece announces the cancer, and the turn is managed without melodrama. Sacks takes stock, decides to stop following politics and the evening news, and admits in one plain line that fear is present. Then he states the book’s thesis outright: “my predominant feeling is one of gratitude.” It reads less as a slogan than as a decision he keeps renewing.
The Long Shadow of Cricklewood
The final essay, “Sabbath,” is the reason to own Gratitude by Oliver Sacks. It opens in the Orthodox Jewish streets of north-west London in the 1930s, where every shop shutters before Friday sunset. His mother, a surgeon, sets her work aside at midday to cook, then lights the candles with cupped hands; his father blesses the wine. The writing is affectionate and exact, full of honey cake, cold salmon and walks to an aunt’s house after synagogue.
Then, at eighteen, his father draws out of him that he is attracted to men, and his mother responds the next morning with words so cruel that they turn him for good against what faith can do to people. Once qualified as a doctor, he leaves England altogether. The essay passes quickly through the drift that followed: Los Angeles, the weightlifters of Muscle Beach, a dangerous dependence on amphetamines, and at last a vocation among the patients of a Bronx hospital.
A Seat at Someone Else’s Table
What gives Gratitude by Oliver Sacks its last movement is a return. A cousin, the economist Robert John Aumann, insists on fixing a mezuzah to his door and later tells him that he would have turned down his Nobel Prize rather than travel on a Saturday. In 2014 another cousin, about to turn a hundred in Jerusalem, invites him to the party, and Sacks reverses a sixty-year-old decision in the space of a phone call. In Israel he and his partner Billy are welcomed together to Aumann’s Friday-night meal, a moment that answers his mother without ever saying so.
There is no Thanksgiving in this book. Yet a reader looking for something to open during the long weekend, once the dishes are done, will find the closing pages of Gratitude by Oliver Sacks surprisingly close to the spirit of the holiday: a family gathered around food, a ritual of thanks, and an outsider given a place at the table. Sacks ends by thinking of the Sabbath as the seventh day of a life as well as of a week.
What Oliver Sacks Leaves Unsaid
The objections are modest but real. Gratitude by Oliver Sacks is very short, and it is lopsided: “Sabbath” carries most of the emotional freight, while the opening birthday essay is gentle to the point of weightlessness. Fear is named and then politely shown the door, which is admirable as conduct and slightly thin as writing; anyone hoping for a full reckoning with dread will find only its outline. The comfortable conditions of this death, close friends, good doctors, a desk of beautiful objects, pass without comment, which is no fault in a dying man but limits how widely the example applies. And the foreword mostly retells what the essays are about to say.
The Writer Oliver Sacks Became
Sacks was born in July 1933 and died at home in Manhattan at the end of August 2015. He settled in the United States in the early 1960s yet never took citizenship, once describing himself as a resident alien and rather liking the phrase. For years he swam the open water around City Island in the Bronx. His late partnership with Bill Hayes, who co-wrote the foreword here, became the subject of Hayes’s own memoir, Insomniac City, two years later.
His afterlife has been busy. The New York Public Library acquired his archive in 2024, including some thirty-five thousand letters, and a selection of his correspondence appeared from Knopf the same year. Ric Burns made a documentary of his life in 2019, and the television drama Brilliant Minds draws on his career. His books have been translated into more than twenty-five languages, and during his lifetime a steady stream of young doctors named them as the reason they went into neurology. Readers who want the full story should start with On the Move, completed only days before the diagnosis that frames this book.
Where It Leaves You
For a book that can be finished in an hour, Gratitude by Oliver Sacks leaves an unusually long echo. It is short, uneven and occasionally too composed, but its final essay is among the best things he wrote, and its tone, curious and unafraid, is a gift to anyone sitting with a hard diagnosis.
Readers drawn to its subject might go next to Christopher Hitchens’s Mortality, a far angrier dispatch from the same territory, or to Primo Levi’s The Periodic Table, where the elements also become a way of telling a life. All the Way to the River by Elizabeth Gilbert approaches a partner’s terminal illness from the other side of the bed. And Is a River Alive? by Robert Macfarlane shares Sacks’s instinct to seek comfort in the living world beyond the human.
He wanted to see the stars again at the end. It is pleasant to hope that somebody wheeled him out.