In June 1974, Oliver Sacks wrote to Bob Rodman, a psychiatrist who had been a close friend since they were both medical residents at UCLA. Rodman’s wife, Maria – only 38 years old – had been diagnosed with a mysterious illness that would eventually prove fatal; Rodman wrote to Sacks of his shock, his despair; suicide, he wrote was a “luxury” since the couple had two young daughters.
Sacks’s response is, like so much in this extraordinary volume, a model of honest compassion which powerfully acknowledges the pain and challenge of grief. “I wish I had not been so blind before,” he writes, apologising for a delay in answering. “I did see that you were in the throes of crisis, but I failed to see the real and agonising events behind it.” He offers his own experience, not as distraction, but as means of connection: “I know very well those forces which shut one up and in, which confine one in an extra hell, when one most needs to reach out towards others, towards one another.”
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