Writer and neurologist Oliver Sacks died Aug. 30 at his Manhattan home at age 82.
Sacks died at his home in Greenwich Village with longtime collaborator Kate Edgar and his own partner, Bill Hayes, at his side, CNN noted. Sacks was diagnosed with ocular melanoma almost a decade ago, and treating the cancer left him blind in one eye; however, the cancer spread to his liver.
The Oxford-educated Sacks—who shot to fame as the doctor Robin Williams played in the 1990 film Awakenings—revealed in February that he had terminal cancer. The movie, which Penny Marshall directed, was based on Sacks’ 1973 book of the same name.
The Washington Post reported that Sacks talked about his own sexuality, saying in his memoir On the Move that the mother called him “an abomination” upon learning about his same-sex leanings. Sacks reflected that “[m]y mother did not mean to be cruel, to wish me dead. She was suddenly overwhelmed, I now realize, and she probably regretted her words or perhaps partitioned them off in a closeted part of her mind.
“But her words haunted me for much of my life and played a major part in inhibiting and injecting with guilt what should have been a free and joyous expression of sexuality.”
The Washington Post article is at www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/oliver-sacks-doctor-of-awakenings-and-poet-laureate-of-medicine-dies-at-82/2015/08/30/62ba620c-4f0c-11e5-933e-7d06c647a395_story.html. The CNN item is at www.cnn.com/2015/08/30/us/neurologist-oliver-sacks-dies/.