Oliver Sacks and the loneliness of a great humanitarian doctor.

In my long season of heartbreak and loneliness I once more look for a friend. I’m riding the tide of what Freud (who may have been wrong about everything but was also right about everything) called melancholia. Cognitive behaviorists might call it a slew of distortions.In truth, I’ve many beautiful friends. Who show up. Clean the fridge in my new apartment. Set up my living room. Pour wine spritzers and sit on the deck and roll eyes at our happy, healthy, wrestling children.So why this aching loneliness that just won’t quit? I fall in love with strangers four times a day. A quirky gesture, a turn of phrase, a graceful gait. That’s all it takes. But it’s unrequited; this sublimated love that has no real grit… maybe that’s what I can muster. Love that can’t be returned and will never be rejected. It’s utterly secret.I’m in love with the world and my life in it. I’ll sound dramatic (no surprise) but every small accomplishment, every trip I take or task I finish I feel as though I’ve snatched it out from the maw of death. Ha! You can’t take it away now, I’ve lived it! I’ve moon gazed in the pouring rain with bare feet on steaming asphalt. I’ve eaten just-picked berries! I’ve smoothed the hair of my fluish child until he slept in my arms. It’s mine forever infernal eternity.As is often the case, the right book finds me. I’m reading Oliver Sack’s memoir, On the Move. The fates saved it for the exact right moment. Oliver was not at all like me demographically. He was not like me in temperament. But we share two characteristics that buoy me when I feel low. First, the treatment of medical science as a humanity. Medicine as observation and experimentation in bettering our human existence. It indulges curiosity and regards no dogma in pursuit of understanding, helping, and healing.Second, a protective self-enforced loneliness. Oliver was uniquely capable in his role as benevolent understander and wizened healer because of the isolation in which he held himself. Hundreds of close friends, thousands of adoring colleagues, tens of thousands of grateful patients, millions of entranced readers, but almost zero binding couple or familial loves in his life. However, I can attest: the grey tedium of monk-like living makes the wider world explosive with color, intrigue, stories to be learned, mysteries to solve, and hallucinations to manifest. That, I suppose, is the trade off.I take heart that a mind so bright and wide walked the earth. If over the course of my life I manage one one-hundredth of his cleverness, curiosity, tender care of the sick, and generous story telling I would happily suffer an existence one hundred times as lonely.Be mesmerized by one of his last interviews and storytelling sessions.This is the gratitude I find at the bottom of the I’m feeling sorry for myself well. It is great and deep and sustaining.