JessicaRulestheUniverse.com

Oliver Sacks illustration by Aidan Koch

In February the neurologist, writer and all-around super-nerd Oliver Sacks wrote that he had metastatic cancer and did not have long to live. He sounded more serene and cheerful as he awaited the end than many people with decades and decades ahead of them. Last week he published an update on his condition. It is dire. And yet he sounds almost excited to be at the final frontier. We know that when the time comes, in the event that there is an afterlife and there is any way he can report to us from there, he will.

We haven’t gotten around to reviewing his autobiography On The Move because we get too emotional.

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I have tended since early boyhood to deal with loss — losing people dear to me — by turning to the nonhuman. When I was sent away to a boarding school as a child of 6, at the outset of the Second World War, numbers became my friends; when I returned to London at 10, the elements and the periodic table became my companions. Times of stress throughout my life have led me to turn, or return, to the physical sciences, a world where there is no life, but also no death.

And now, at this juncture, when death is no longer an abstract concept, but a presence — an all-too-close, not-to-be-denied presence — I am again surrounding myself, as I did when I was a boy, with metals and minerals, little emblems of eternity. At one end of my writing table, I have element 81 in a charming box, sent to me by element-friends in England: It says, “Happy Thallium Birthday,”a souvenir of my 81st birthday last July; then, a realm devoted to lead, element 82, for my just celebrated 82nd birthday earlier this month. Here, too, is a little lead casket, containing element 90, thorium, crystalline thorium, as beautiful as diamonds, and, of course, radioactive — hence the lead casket.

Read it.