Oliver Sacks, the famed neurologist who died on August 30 in Manhattan at the age of 82, left an extraordinary legacy in his writings — as did Spalding Gray, the famed monologist who committed suicide in 2004 at the age of 62.The lives of this remarkable duo, the empathetic doctor and the self-lacerating theater artist, intersected in 2003 in a series of consultations that Sacks recalled in “The Catastrophe,” a New Yorker essay published last April.Thanks to Sacks and this article, Gray’s death is now seen in a more forgiving light. All his life, the actor had been given to depression and a tendency toward bi-polar disorder, which contributed to neurotic behavior he had spun into gold, beginning in 1985 with the hilarious monologue “Swimming to Cambodia” that was later adapted into a film by Jonathan Demme. A series of groundbreaking monologues followed, including “Monster in a Box” and “ Gray’s Anatomy.” But the celebrated career was a casualty of a catastrophic accident.In June of 2001, while on vacation in Ireland, Gray was involved in a head-on collision, which left him with a broken hip and a fractured skull. A deep and debilitating depression set in and the actor, who had long been haunted by his mother’s suicide, became obsessed with taking his own life. When Kathie Russo, Gray’s wife, first approached Sacks for help, the doctor demurred, telling her that he treated neurological disorders and not depression. But when it became clear that fragments of bone had penetrated Gray’s frontal lobe, Sacks took him on as a patient, beginning in July of 2003 and continuing until the actor’s death. Sacks diagnosed what he called “an extreme injury” to the brain, which in time might be corrected. This was hopeful news to Russo since other specialists had indicated that there might be permanent brain damage. Nonetheless, Gray’s behavior was listless and peevish. He could no longer hike, ski, or bike, activities that in the past had helped him keep on an even keel. Even in this reduced state, Gray was planning to use the tragedy of the accident and the subsequent surgeries as fodder for another performance piece, which he planned to title “Life Interrupted.” Unsurprisingly, the actor often raised the topic of suicide in his sessions with Sacks, describing it as part of the life story he had so nakedly exposed on stage. He told Sacks that he regretted not taking his life in front of a reporter who had been interviewing him in order to demonstrate a “creative suicide” then and there. “I was at pains to say that he would be more creative alive than dead,” wrote Sacks in the article. One of Sacks’ more notable discoveries came after one of Gray’s surgeries, a four-hour process during which he had been under a general anesthetic. The doctor observed that when he came to for a period of twelve hours or so, “Spalding was his old self, talkative and full of ideas. His hopelessness had vanished.” But by the next day that spurt of energy had also vanished. Sacks was in the process of evaluating how the anesthesia might have played a role in Gray’s salutary, if temporary, behavioral modification when he received news that the actor had committed suicide, presumably by jumping from the Staten Island Ferry, in January of 2004. His body was recovered in the East River three months later.Russo told Carol Off, the moderator of the radio show “As It Happens,” that she was appreciative of Sacks’s interest in her husband not only because it helped her to understand the severity of her husband’s condition but also because it illuminated the circumstances around his death. “I wanted people to know exactly what was wrong with Spalding because many thought that this was just another depression he couldn’t get out of and that’s why he committed suicide,” she said. “Yes, he was prone to depression, but had a severe brain injury as well.”In his last months, and aware of his terminal diagnosis, Sacks wrote, “Over the last few days, I have been able to see my life as from a great altitude, as a sort of landscape, and with a deepening sense of the connection of all its parts. This does not mean that I am finished with life. On the contrary I feel intensely alive, and I want and hope in the time that remains to deepen my friendships, to say farewell to those I love, to write more, to travel if I have the strength, to achieve new levels of understanding and insight.”While Gray had no such clarity, Sacks was able to provide some solace to those he left behind, a healer to the end.
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