NY TIMES Reviews C Patient's Book
- From: "Robert Cohen" <robtcohen@xxxxxxx>
- Date: 14 Mar 2006 05:25:01 -0800
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/14/health/14book.html?_r=1&oref=slogin
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When Cancer Strikes, a High Achiever Plans
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By CORNELIA DEAN
Published: March 14, 2006
"Chasing Daylight: How My Forthcoming Death Transformed My Life," by
Eugene O'Kelly, McGraw-Hill, $19.95.
Everyone who is alive is under a sentence of death. But few people
realize it, and fewer still learn in advance the timetable of their
demise.
Eugene O'Kelly was one of those few. Last May, his wife, Corinne,
noticed that one side of his face seemed to be sagging slightly.
Neither thought much about it. At 53, Mr. O'Kelly seemed in robust
health, working long hours and traveling for his job as chairman and
chief executive of the giant accounting firm KPMG (US).
But after a doctor's visit, an M.R.I. scan and then another, more
specialized, M.R.I. test, Mr. O'Kelly received devastating news. He had
glioblastoma multiforme, an aggressive brain cancer that would kill him
in a few months - 100 days, his doctors said.
"I had focused on building and planning for the future," Mr. O'Kelly
writes in "Chasing Daylight."
"Now I would have to learn the true value of the present."
His memoir tells how he did that, in the process offering guidance for
others who will end up in the same spot. In other words, everyone.
Though he tells how he often lies awake at night, weeping, Mr. O'Kelly
also acknowledges his good fortune. He has plenty of money, good health
insurance, a wide network of warm friendships, a loving family and
strong religious faith. He is even able to be grateful for the ability
to exercise "control over my life, the final and most precious inches
of my life, for the last real time I was able to."
Perhaps because of his experience running a large corporation, he
approaches this like the goal-oriented high achiever he had been all
his life. He does not have a few months to adjust to the news, he
writes.
He has a few months, full stop. "If I was going to emerge from the
misery of my condition and somehow make something positive of it, I
would have to do it fast and efficiently - and get it right the first
time."
First he must decide how to treat his cancer, opting against
chemotherapy. It may buy time, he reasons, but not much, and not much
time "full of life." Then he steps down as chief executive. Then he
makes a list of what he wants to do next.
Some items on the list are routine like putting his finances in order
and planning his funeral. Some are not.
For one thing, he decides to "unwind" relationships with important
people in his life - and there are many of them - with explicitly
final conversations. Sometimes he finds this easier than they do.
Some friends and colleagues urge him to fight his disease with the
chemo he has rejected or insist on calling after they have had what he
hopes will be their last good talk. Sometimes, he thinks, he is more
reconciled to his imminent death than they are.
He also wants his final days to be filled with "perfect moments" - a
good meal with fine wine, a meaningful conversation, a beautiful
afternoon in the park. "I marveled at how many Perfect Moments I was
having now," he writes.
The meditations on turning ordinary experiences into "perfect moments"
is perhaps the most useful guidance he offers those not yet facing the
timetable he confronted. Finding perfection in the mundane is a skill
too many leave undeveloped, and undervalued.
He did not succeed in all his goals. He began experiencing seizures.
Vision faded. He was not always able to stay in the moment. "Unwinding"
with his daughter Gina, only 13 when he fell ill, proved difficult.
Perhaps, he concedes, it is impossible to perform so painful a task
with someone so young, someone who is, as his wife puts it in the
book's afterword, so unwilling to let go.
Most doctors are (wisely) unwilling to be specific when people with
life-threatening ailments ask how much time they have left. Survival
statistics are gathered in aggregate, but people die individually. Mr.
O'Kelly died in September, just as his doctors had predicted.
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