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Chasing Daylight: How My Forthcoming Death Transformed My Life [AUDIOBOOK] (Audio CD) (Audio CD)
by Gene O'Kelly
| Category:
Biography, Motivation, Meaning of life, Thought on life and death |
| Market price: ¥ 308.00
MSL price:
¥ 278.00
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| Stock:
Pre-order item, lead time 3-7 weeks upon payment [ COD term does not apply to pre-order items ] |
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MSL rating:
 Good for Gifts |
| MSL Pointer Review:
Gripping, sad and ultimately very life affirming, this beautifully written book is a gift to everyone who loves life. |
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AllReviews |
1 Total 1 pages 8 items |
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Janet Maslin (The New York Times, MSL quote), USA
<2007-10-19 00:00>
Voicing universal truths not often found in business or how-to tracts... [O'Kelly] made a success out of his final mission. |
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Publishers Weekly (MSL quote), USA
<2007-10-19 00:00>
O'Kelly, the former CEO and chairman of accounting juggernaut KPMG who was diagnosed with brain cancer at 53, writes about his "forthcoming death" as one would expect an accountant to: methodically. He charts his downward spiral, from symptoms to diagnosis to the process of dying in this poignant and posthumously published book. (O'Kelly died in September 2005.) O'Kelly's narrative recounts the steps he took to simplify his life-how he learned, for instance, "to be in the present moment, how to live there at least for snippets of time"-and the final experiences he shared with close friends and family. But his story falters on several occasions. O'Kelly provides few substantial details regarding his long career with KPMG; what information he does offer, and his wishes for the firm's continued success, read like portions of a company newsletter. He also refers constantly to his "wife of 27 years, Corinne, the girl of my dreams," but he fails to give readers a sense of her spirit and personality. (She wrote the final chapter, which takes place largely in the hospital as O'Kelly refuses food and water, eventually dying of an embolism.) Nor do readers learn much of O'Kelly's 14-year-old daughter, other than she's bright and he loves her. Though less than perfect, O'Kelly's examination of the life he lived and the opportunities he missed while climbing the corporate ladder will resonate with readers in "foot to the pedal" careers.
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BusinessWeek (MSL quote), USA
<2007-10-19 00:00>
Even In Death,Gene O' Kelly Wanted To Succeed
When the CEO of KPMG learned he had terminal brain cancer, he set out to chronicle his last days
In the spring of 2004, Eugene O'Kelly had a premonition: Trouble was coming. He couldn't make out its shape or size, and the only response he could think of was to move from the townhouse in Manhattan he shared with his wife, Corinne, and their 12-year-old daughter, Gina, to a smaller apartment in the city. At the time, O'Kelly was chairman and chief executive of KPMG International, the accounting firm where he had worked for three decades. He was 52, at the peak of his career, feeling, as he would later say, "vigorous, indefatigable, and damn near immortal."
A year later he and Corinne had sold their house and most of their furniture and found a light-filled aerie overlooking the East River. Around the same time, Corinne noticed that the right side of her husband's face was sagging. He agreed to see a neurologist after he returned from a business trip to China by way of Seattle, where he would attend the Microsoft CEO Summit. Back in Manhattan the weekend before his appointment, he and Corinne were at a U2 concert with longtime clients when suddenly Corinne bolted from her seat. "I feel like our world is about to blow apart," she told her husband.
Within a week, Gene was diagnosed with inoperable late-stage brain cancer and, though no doctor would come right out and say so, he knew he couldn't expect to live past the summer. He died at home on Sept. 10. During those 100 days he worked with his wife and writer Andrew Postman to chronicle his attempt to face death with as much brightness, if not hope, as possible. Chasing Daylight: How My Forthcoming Death Transformed My Life was published this month by McGraw-Hill, which, like BusinessWeek, is a unit of The McGraw-Hill Companies. The book wasn't intended as a guide, Corinne says, but Gene was a mentor, and that instinct remained intact. His advice is simple: Confront your own mortality, sooner rather than later. As he says: "I'll be glad if my approach and perspective might provide help for a better death - and for a better life right now."
Gene was methodical, organized, unequivocating, thorough. He was an accountant by temperament as much as by training. Faced with imminent death, he wanted to be the master of his farewell. "I wanted these things, and only these things: Clarity. Intensity. Perfection... I was motivated to 'succeed' at death - that is, to try to be constructive about it, and thus have the right death for me. To be clear about it and present during it. To embrace it."
In early June he resigned from KPMG, started six weeks of radiation treatment to try to shrink the three tumors and diminish the symptoms (blurred vision, garbled speech, and certain cognitive impairments) that had begun to emerge. And he made a to-do list for his final days: get legal and financial affairs in order, unwind relationships, simplify, live in the moment, create (but also be open to) great moments, begin transition to next state, plan funeral. He recognized how Type A this was, yet what it required of him was the very opposite - to let go. As he says: "While I do believe that the business mindset is, in important ways, useful at the end of life, it sounds pretty weird to try to be CEO of one's own death... Given the profoundness of dying, and how different its quality felt from the life I led, I had to undo at least as many business habits as I tried to maintain."
With Corinne's guidance he began to meditate in the morning to help develop the mental discipline they both believed he would need in those last moments of life. It was on one of those mornings, when he had been sitting in the courtyard of the Cloisters, a museum of medieval art in Upper Manhattan, with a fountain running in the background, that he told her he wanted the two of them to write a book about his dying.
SPIRITUAL JOURNEY
Corinne says now that she was initially ambivalent about the idea: At the time she was managing Gene's medical care, meeting with lawyers, concerned about Gina and their elder daughter, Marianne. She knew the project would sap Gene's energy. But he wanted to share what he called his spiritual journey, and he wanted to leave his daughters something. "The last gift I could give him was to let him do it his way and to make his dying as beautiful as possible," Corinne says, sitting in the living room she has only recently furnished.
From that moment in the Cloisters until the last week of his life, Gene wrote down his thoughts on a yellow legal pad or dictated them to his assistant. He worked intermittently throughout the day while also meeting with colleagues, friends, and family to, as he says, close their relationships. He also kept in touch with the new chairman of KPMG by phone. That summer the firm would admit to criminal tax fraud and agree to pay $456 million in penalties, a settlement that he had been working on. (He would say to Corinne: "This can't be another Enron.") Corinne says the fact that the case had been resolved helped Gene die peacefully.
At KPMG one of Gene's priorities had been to change the firm's culture - to make it more compassionate, a place where, he would later say, "we felt more alive." He wanted his staff "to get the most out of each moment and day - for the firm's benefit and the individual's - and not just pass through it." But as the head of the 20,000-employee company, he had remained relentlessly focused on the future, willing to sacrifice his home life for the satisfactions of the job.
In those last few months, though, he came to realize, he says, that his thinking had been too narrow, his boundaries too strict. "Had I known then what I knew now," he says, "almost certainly I would have been more creative in figuring out a way to live a more balanced life, to spend more time with my family." That, says Corinne, was his one regret. He had been getting better at finding that balance before he became sick, she says, but then he ran out of time. |
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Kathleen San Martino (MSL quote), USA
<2007-10-19 00:00>
This book is phenomenal. Those with a Type A personality will certainly appreciate the approach the author took to put closure on his impending death. Since another reader had mentioned that Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking was better, I had decided to read both books. I absolutely loved Chasing Daylight better although both books have value.
Chasing Daylight deals with the author's approach to putting closure on his life three months before his death; therefore, the book is more about life than death. Didion's book is about one person's disjointed feelings regarding the death of her husband and sickness of her child within days of each other. It offers a good look into the confused state of the grieving person. Both books look at life and death from different angles.
Chasing Daylight certainly makes one think of what is important in their life. I highly recommend it as reading for all - especially Type A people. I do not feel the author was too businesslike as suggested by another reader. I felt he dealt with his impending death head on and developed extremely important insights. One insight was about commitment. Commitment is not what most people think and this author touched on it perfectly. Commitment is not about how much time you put in at work or on a particular task or personal event. It's about the quality of that time and how passionate you are about that commitment. For those of you working all those long hours, you'll probably think twice after reading this book.
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Rolf Dobelli (MSL quote), USA
<2007-10-19 00:00>
What if a doctor looked you in the eyes today and told you flat-out that you had about 100 days to live, and there was zero chance anything could change that shocking reality? What would you do? How would you spend your last days? In May 2005, Eugene O'Kelly, then the CEO of KPMG, received the bitter news that he wouldn't live out the year due to brain cancer. An accountant by training and a type-A personality by nature, O'Kelly set in motion a strategy for making the most of his last days. Part of that plan included writing a book on how to bring closure to life and prepare for the great transition to come. One conclusion: Sometimes you have to work hard at the "business of dying." O'Kelly's stoic, rational courage in the face of the unknown has produced this gift for all those he left behind. We recommend it highly for its priceless lessons about how to live. |
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Cole Carley (MSL quote), USA
<2007-10-19 00:00>
Every action, according to Newton's 3rd law, has its reaction. Beginning and ending; hello and goodbye; birth and death; meeting and parting. This book is about the BIG parting: A man from his life, wife, and family. Mr. O'Kelly faced imminent death with determination and curiosity. In the process, he wrote a book that is both touching and instructive; a book to be read and reread.
This is a very personal exploration of one person's transition from this life. I found it especially relevant to me because I lost my wife to cancer in 2000. Her period from diagnosis to death was only a month, and much wound up left unsaid and undone as we both dealt in our own ways with that nasty turn of events. Mr. O'Kelly's passage from this life shows us that courage is not the absence of fear; it is going ahead in spite of it.
Mr. O'Kelly talks about being blessed in several ways, by this twist of life that caused his death. One way is that, unlike many people, he had time to prepare for his death and to say goodbye to the people that had meaning in his life. Another rare "blessing" is that his particular type of brain tumor carried with it no pain and had a gradual lessening of the senses which meant that he was able to carry on physically and mentally during the 3+ months he had left. That concept would be actually terrifying to some people; Mr. O'Kelly chose to make the most of it and to "control" his death much as he had striven to control his life.
I would recommend this for those of you who have had to deal with the death of someone close. In addition, you might also read "Life After Love" by Bob Deits and The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion. |
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Tom E. Johnson (MSL quote), USA
<2007-10-19 00:00>
I have the highest praise for Eugene O'Kelly's book, and highly recommend it for everyone to read. It is one of the very few books that, upon reading it, I have gone out to purchase extra copies, to give to special friends. It is a book that I feel you will come back to, (I certainly will) time and time again for inspiration and guidance, as to how to best live as quality a life as possible. It has certainly moved me greatly and at the same time, hopefully greatly improved me.
To begin with, I could so empathise with Eugene's truly awful predicament, being around the same age as him myself and also a father, but what truly amazed me was the response he chose to make to this predicament. It was this response (as recorded in the book), which marked him out for me as a very special higher order type of human being - one who should be listened to very attentively.
Not only did he use his newly discovered insights in his own life for whatever remaining time he had left, but he very magnanimously decided to devote a sizeable amount of his so precious dwindling time to helping the great mass of non-significant others, of whom I happen to be a member. How many of us would be so thoughtful?
The book is full of advice for living (and not living only 'in the face of death') which I can best classify as higher-order or noble, and the world would be a far better place if more people learned to see life the way Eugene did towards the end. I have already decided to make this book a part of my future life, with the hope that its amazing thoughts will affect the way I live my life in the future.
Eugene is, and will always be a hero and role model for me, somebody whom I would loved to have known in life. And I truly mourn the fact that such a higher order being has passed on with so much still to offer the world. But I honestly believe he crowded more quality being in that two months than most people do in a lifetime. And in sharing his wisdom with us, he has achieved a kind of immortality which all of the great contributors to mankind have achieved. I for one am very grateful to Eugene for helping me to awaken to what truly matters in life, while I still have time. |
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Maria (MSL quote), USA
<2007-10-19 00:00>
Live in the present moment. That's what Eastern religions say. Its what our children and our pets and all of nature teach us. The message is everywhere if you just open yourself to it. Why then, do we chase time and always focus on the future at the expense of the here and now? Part of the answer might lie in our consumer culture that teaches us that having more will solve our problems. There is a pill for every ailment and the sacrificing the present moment will make the future brighter (i.e. I'll do that when I retire). None of this is true of course. Once you realize that, it gets much easier to appreciate the present moment. Enjoy your journey.
I approached this book very skeptically, because I wondered why a man with three months to live would spend it writing a book. I also wondered what wisdom a self admitted "Type A" CEO could impart on me about living in the moment and the dying process.
What I found was a profoundly beautiful and poignant account of one man's process into self awareness and how he reached his goal of dying with the highest level of consciousness that he could attain. Gene, true to his detail oriented personality, very methodically planned his "unwindings" with "friends", planning "Perfect Moments" that they both would appreciate. He admittedly spent too long - three weeks - on his outermost circle of friends. I also wished, as some have noted, that Gene would have scheduled the trip with Gina to Prague earlier in his illness. The key was that he understood and accepted his body's limitations and thus was, as his wife said, "the beginning of his transition." He seemed to embrace this transition with the same energy that made him a success in his business.
I think this book shows us that it doesn't matter when you realize that your life is a journey and to enjoy living in the moment. Obviously, if you understand that message earlier along your journey, you will have a more peaceful (and possibly more enjoyable) life. What really matters though, is that you realize that truth sometime in your life, and from that you set a goal to attain the highest level of awareness that you can. Since not all of us know the moment of our death, it makes good sense to learn it sooner rather than later. |
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1 Total 1 pages 8 items |
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