A Living

A   LIVING

Now, that’s the Hmmmmmmmm of the Day, isn’t it:

A   LIVING

Just what is. . .

A   LIVING

There are some that say, you don’t really know

A   LIVING

until DYING

Oliver Sacks, died this past weekend. . .

he knew THAT was going to happen.  .  .I suppose we all do, because none of us have ever met anyone who’s ever lived for ever and the chances of us…any of us…being the first are severely unlikely.

Oliver knew a little bit more specifically that he was going to die.  He had cancer. He had multiple metastases in his liver.  Nearly 10 years ago he had a rare tumor of the eye, an ocular melanoma.  He knew then that about 50% of those with ocular melanomas actually metastasize. . .he was of THAT 50%  

Early this year, Oliver. like he so often did, wrote about this situation in the New York Times under the Title of:

“MY OWN LIFE

May I?

. . .”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 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.”

IS  THAT  IT?

A   LIVING

Would you have written; felt those sentiments of Oliver’s?

Do You?

What would you add?

What would you subtract?

The Scientific Study is sound and sure and Universal:

ONE OUT OF ONE OF US DIES

Go ahead. . .research it. . .refute it

One of my favorite quotes from Robert Frost, is also one of my favorite quotes about Life:

“All I know about Life can be summed up in three words: IT  GOES  ON

One thing that the many countless funerals I conduct teaches me–each of them– is:

ONE DAY THIS WILL BE ME

Does  KNOWING  that

make me live any differently?

More generously

More kindly,

More lovingly,

More forgivingly,

More appreciatively,

More graciously,

M     O     R     E

M          O          R          E

M                    O                    R                    E

Well. . .that is the Life long question for all of us. . .

because metastasized melanoma or not

we are all…even at this very moment…one heart beat less than having even just one more.  .  .  .

and that, perhaps most of all, defines

A   LIVING