Perfect Moment, Perfect Days
Excerpts from Chasing Daylight: How My Forthcoming Death Transformed My Life
Eugene O'Kelly (1952 - 2005)
O'Kelly
Eugene O'Kelly was one of America's most powerful businessmen. In May last year, he was told he had brain cancer. In a moving memoir, Chasing Daylight: How My Forthcoming Death Transformed My Life, he describes what his preparations for death taught him about his life.
His life was no different from many of us, who forego many things in the pursuit of our jobs and dreams. Any one of us could have been and could be O'Kelley. But would all of us be as positive and optimistic as he was in the final few months of his life?? I've learnt much from it and I hope it will remind you of the deeper things in life as well....
ONE day not long ago, I sat atop the world.
From this perch, I had an overview that was relatively rare in business, a perspective that allowed me access to the inner workings of many of the world's finest, most successful companies and the extraordinary minds that run them.
At times, I felt like a great eagle on a mountain top. Overnight, I found myself sitting in a very different perch: a hard metal chair, looking across a desk at a doctor whose expression was way too full of empathy for my liking.
His eyes told me I would die soon. It was late spring. I had seen my last autumn in New York.
The verdict I received in the last week of May 2005 - that it was unlikely I'd make it to September - turned out to be a gift.
Honestly. Because I was forced - at the age of 53 - to think seriously about my own death; which meant I was forced to think more deeply about my life than I'd ever done.
As CEO and Chairman of KPMG, the US$4 billion, 20-000 employee, century-plus-old partnership, one of America's Big Four Accounting firms, I was not a man given to hypotheticals - but just for a moment, suppose there had been no death sentence.
Wouldn't it be nice still to be planning, building and leading for years to come? Yes and no.
Yes, because of course, I'd like to have been around to see my daughter, Gina, graduate and marry and have children; to spend next Christmas Eve, the day before my older daughter Marianne's birthday, eating and talking and laughing the way we did every year; to travel and play golf with my wife of 27 years, Corinne, and to share with her the retirement in Arizona we'd planned for so long.
But, I also say no.
No, because, thanks to my situation, I'd attained a new level of awareness, one I didn't possess in the first 53 years of my life.
In my past life, a perfect day was a couple of face-to-face client meetings; meeting with at least one member of my inner team; speaking on the phone with partners; and completing the items listed in my electronic calendar.
I loved my firm. But the job of CEO, while, of course, incredibly previleged, was relentless.
My diary was perpetually extended over the next 18 months. I worked weekends and late into many nights. I missed virtually every school function of my younger daughter.
For the first 10 years of my marriage, when I was climbing the ladder at KPMG, Corinne and I rarely went on vacation. Over the course of my last decade with the firm, I did manage to squeeze in workday lunches with my wife. Twice.
As long as I could handle such a high-pressure position, I wanted it.
As profound as my devotion to and love for my family was, I could not have settled for a job just because it guaranteed that I could make PTA meetings.
People don't walk into the top spot. They are driven.
When Corinne and I showed up at the neurologist's office on Tuesday, May 24, we were both convinced that the drooping of muscle in my cheek and at the corner of my mouth was caused my something stress-related, probably Bell's palsy.
A week later, halfway through the biopsy, the surgeon came out to tell Corinne that the first tissue sample he'd removed from my brain was "necrotic" - dead. There was no cure, he said. "This is terminal."
My days as a man at the top of his game, vigorous and productive, were done, just like that.
The whole of my life, I had expected people to operate at a high standard.
In the business world, our index for evaluating people was competency. It had to be.
If someone said something that was carelessly conceived, I was not above telling him or her that it was "a stupid thing to say."
My daily experience at the radiation clinic made me realise that was not the index I could use any more.
Things almost never go according to plan. Sitting in that room, waiting for my turn to have the waffle-mask put over my face so they could zap my brain with laser beams, I watched people around me grow frustrated.
It was at the clinic that I really began to understand acceptance. Apparently, I wasn't too old to learn something new. You can't control everything.
One of my tasks before I died was to "unwind", or close - or, as I saw it, beautifully resolve - my personal relationships.
I wanted to do the very thing that wiser people advise us to do - to stop long enough to think about the people we love and why we love them.
A few days later the diagnosis was confirmed, I saw down at the dining-room table and drew a list of classmates, acquaintances, neighbours, people who had enriched my life just by being in it.
I was astounded to see that it came to almost one thousand. An unbelievable number.
I couldn't possible "close" all of these relationships. Maybe half, I closed almost exclusively through mail. A number of them I did by phone.
In each case, I tired to focus on something especially meaningful. I attempted to turn the occassion into what I had come to think of as a Perfect Moment.
A Perfect Moment was a little gift of an hour or an afternoon. Its actual length was never the issue.
The key thing was that you had to be open to a Perfect Moment.
The radiation machine breaks down: one hour is going to come and go, an hour you can hardly spare; but then you accept that machines break down.
You don't get frustrated. You focus instead on something pleasing.
The beautiful poem your daughter wrote. The colour of the sky out the window.
Or you stroll with your wife past the Central Part Boathouse - already it's a Perfect Moment, a beautiful day.
Such a beautiful day, in fact - that it's impossible to get a table at the boathouse restaurant, and normally you wouldn't even bother to ask.
But that was before you were open to all kinds of moments. Somehow, a table has opened. You sit down. The serendipity of the day's unfolding is making it perfect.
I thought about how, during my previous life, I'd got into the habit of meeting with certain people.
Was it necessary to have breakfast with them four times a month? I could have done less of that.
Perhaps I could have found time, in the last decade, to have had a weekday lunch with my wife more than ... twice?
Of course, there had been Perfect Moments in my past. The day I married Corinne. The day I adopted Marianne. The day Gina was born.
But almost all those moments one could have seen coming. They weren't the mundane, fabric-of-life stuff.
Maybe other people appreciate the perfection in small moments; I was just too caught up in my fast-paced, high-pressured life to ever get at the sublimeness embedded in them.
I experienced more Perfect Moments and Perfect Days in two weeks than I had in the past five years. Some friends wanted to prolong our final encounter. They continued to call me.
"I'd like this to be it," I would say. "Trying to improve on a perfect moment never works."
Not a popular answer. Too final. Kind of cold, actually.
Although I was not there yet, my mind wandered often to my unwinding with Gina. She had recently turned 14, and, like anyone that age, she had her days.
We'd frequently gone out for delicious lunches, and we loved sharing our theories.
But both of us could have short tempers, and obviously, we were frustrated by what was happening. I wanted her to understand my confidence and pride in, and profound love for her.
But I struggled to come up with the best way for a father to make his daughter see him for who he was, rather than for how long he had stayed.
This was the best day of my life.
Corinne, Gina and I were at our vacation home in Lake Tahoe. We took a boat out.
For the first time, I sat in front, the only place Gina ever sits. The water looked like glass. There were hardly any other boats out, or it seemed that way.
We crossed the lake. We seemed to be riding not in the water but on it, skating along the surfaces. It seemed as if I was part of the water.
It went on for miles and miles. I loved the sensation of being so close to the water.
Or really, it wasn't so much that I loved anything, but just that I had the sensation, felt it fully.
Corinne and I decided that afternoon that we would both have our ashes spread upon the waters of Emerald Bay, in a very particular spot that we loved.
I was getting closer to zero miles an hour. My mother and my brother flew to Tahoe. I took my mother's hand and told her I was in a good place.
Later, my brother and I talked alone. He was angry that this should be happening to me.
I told him to take the energy he was spending being angry at the world, double it, and channel it into love for his children (or even more love, I should say, because William already loved his daughters and son dearly.)
He promised me he would.
It was a perfect day. I felt complete. Spent but complete.
Eugene O'Kelly died at 8.01 in the evening of Saturday, Sept 10, 2005
Taken from New Sunday Times, Sunday Column by Kalimullah Hassan.
Comments