The Lucidity of Dying

We consider it a luxury, but it appears that travel strikes a much deeper chord

The New York Times published a kind of goodbye column from famed psychiatrist Oliver Sacks recently. Sacks is the author of numerous books about neurological anomalies, like Awakenings, a heartbreaking book about catatonic patients who are cured by a new drug, only to fall back into their lifeless states (it became a film starring Robert DeNiro and Robin Williams), and The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, which relates the story of an amiable musician who couldn’t tell the difference between his beloved and his favorite chapeau. He spoke to his hat as readily as his wife, and tried to wear them both on at least one occasion.

The editorial wasn’t the normal, cheerful “I’m going to spend more time with my family” send off. Sacks, who’s now 81 years old, was recently diagnosed with a rare, deadly form of cancer that had metastasized to his liver. He doesn’t have much time left. His reflections on the end of his life are lovely, honestly — sad, of course, but leavened with wisdom and perspective, and filled with the kind of authentic nostalgia that comes from a life well-lived. It’s equally affecting when he looks forward, to a suddenly very short horizon, because he’s ruthlessly efficient in his parsing out of the days: He’ll not waste time worrying about politics, or global warming. He still cares deeply about such things, “but they are no longer my business; they belong to the future.” Instead, Sacks continues, he’ll try “to deepen my friendships, to say farewell to those I love, to write more, to travel if I have the strength…” In short, he’ll spend time saying goodbye to the world — as much of it as he can.

Travel always seems to find its way into this kind of list, this last frugal accounting of the dying. Friends and family are givens, for the most part. But seeing what one hasn’t seen — it’s so often in the mix. Maybe it’s part of some final effort to put yourself in a broader context, to see your own story and experience reflected back at you in ways that differ in a hundred particulars, but hardly at all in the essentials. There’s amazement in that. And some degree of comfort.

“Over the last few days, I have been able to see my life as from a great altitude, as a sort of landscape, and with a deepening sense of the connection of all its parts…” — Oliver Sacks.

The perspective isn’t unique to the dying elder, though. A few months before, a 29-year-old woman named Brittany Maynard briefly emerged into the American consciousness, powerfully addressing the “death with dignity” question in an unflinching letter to CNN. Faced with an aggressive brain tumor, she was given six months to live. Whatever the politics — and for the record, I stand firmly with her — Maynard wrote that she wanted the choice to end her life at the time and in the manner of her choosing. Having moved to Oregon with her new husband, where death with dignity is legal, she listed her final priorities in a few lucid, wrenching sentences:

“Having this choice at the end of my life has become incredibly important. It has given me a sense of peace during a tumultuous time that otherwise would be dominated by fear, uncertainty and pain.”

“Now, I’m able to move forward in my remaining days or weeks I have on this beautiful Earth, to seek joy and love and to spend time traveling to outdoor wonders of nature with those I love. And I know that I have a safety net.”

Again, there’s the familiar litany: family, friendship — and then the odd man out, the thing that’s not like the others. Travel. It’s stark enough, this inclusion, to make you sit down and wonder if there’s not more to it. If you’ve been giving travel its proper due, or classifying it in ways that undervalue it substantially. An experiment by the University of Colorado and Cornell sheds some light on the question. Using a national survey and a controlled experiment with human subjects, the study concluded that memories of experiential purchases, like travel or concert tickets, left subjects much happier than memories of the material possessions, like clothing or gadgets.

It turns out, the study shows, that seemingly important purchases like computers and cars fade from human memory quickly. The things that last — that stick with us as cherished memories and become permanent parts of who we are, even as we approach the end of our lives — are powerful experiences, like that first time you set foot in Paris, or that very last trip with your aging parent.

— Steve Merrill

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Photo source / Gouldy99 via Flickr ; the photo is used under a Creative Common license. Many thanks to Gouldy99 for making it available.