Chasing Daylight - by Eugene O’Kelly

Published: May 23, 2025

Chasing Daylight - by Eugene O’Kelly

Read: 2025-05-23

Recommend: 8/10

He was a Penn State alumnus who learned to live in the present moment after his cancer diagnosis. I had a glimpse into his life both before and after this shift in perspective. It’s a powerful reminder for me to stay mindful as I work toward advancing my career.

Notes

Here are some text that I highlighted in the book:

Before the diagnosis, my last thought every night before falling asleep usually concerned something that was to happen one month to six months later. After the diagnosis, my last thought before falling asleep was … the next day.
“You may have the passion to be a great baseball player,” she said, “but not the talent.” It took me the better part of that summer to adjust to what my mother had, lovingly, told me. She wanted me to hold onto my passion while also following a path where my talent could flower. I didn’t stop playing ball, or being a fan, and I eventually came to see she was right. Freshman year at Penn State, I tried to win a spot on the team as a walk-on but I didn’t make it. I didn’t have as much talent as my brother, and even he wasn’t good enough to get past a certain level.
Some friends and colleagues seemed almost offended by my attitude and chosen course, as if I had laid bare the fact that miracles, or their possibility, were ultimately worth rejecting. (Of course a part of me hoped that the front page of tomorrow’s New York Times would announce the miraculous medical breakthrough that would buy me a couple more decades. But I couldn’t afford to spend an ounce of energy on that possibility.) Most of the people I met wanted me to live forever—or at least for several more years. That way, the immediacy of what I represented could be made less immediate—to them.
But the job of CEO, while of course incredibly privileged, was tough. Relentless. Full of pressure. And it was not as if it would ever let up: My calendar was perpetually extended out over the next 18 months. I was always moving at 100 miles an hour. I worked all the time. I worked weekends. I worked late into many nights. I missed virtually every school function for my younger daughter. My annual travel schedule averaged, conservatively, 150,000 miles. For the first 10 years of my marriage, when I was climbing the ladder at KPMG, Corinne and I rarely went on vacation. After that, vacations were mostly rolled into the corporate outings I was required to attend. One year, when we were still living in the Bay Area, our biggest account, based in New York, required my full attention; I lived there for nine months, getting back to the West Coast only on weekends to see my family. Over the course of my last decade with the firm, I did manage to squeeze in workday lunches with my wife. Twice.
If I accepted the job offer, I’d pretty much be guaranteeing us big, big money down the road—in return for being on the road all the time, working insane hours, spending most of my life away from my wife and child. Or I could go back to accounting and the job I’d had at Peat Marwick the previous two years. That would mean less money, less excitement, but more time with my family. More balance in my life. I’d always aspired to be a Renaissance Man. To know about wine and opera, to read books. I loved sports and wanted to be physically active, to spend at least some time in nature. I considered myself a curious person, and wanted to learn as much as I could. In short, I did not aspire to be a CEO. I returned to being an accountant. But after a quarter-century at my firm, I rose to the top position. My life changed. The balance in it faded. Spontaneity died. Forget stealing away for the midnight showing of The Rocky Horror Picture Show, as Corinne and Marianne and I once could in San Francisco. Our subscription to the opera frequently went unused. My wine newsletters sat unread—or, if I did peruse them, I did it while also doing several other things, the master of multitasking. I was always distracted by work. The number of people for whom I was professionally responsible had grown to the thousands.
But of all the things I loved about golf, the most important was that it allowed Corinne and me to have time to ourselves. In particular, we loved to play late in the day. The course tended to be emptier. The sun was lower in the sky, making the shadows longer and the trees bordering each hole look more impressive and beautiful. It was a magical time to play. When we were out there, we felt almost touched by something, our senses heightened. It was as if we weren’t just playing golf, but chasing daylight, grabbing as much time as we could.
I knew hope existed, and I knew it was largely up to me to uncover it. I remembered when my good friend Bill had had a seven-way heart bypass. After three days of lying in his hospital bed, he was told by the doctor that he could take 25 steps. Bill did his exercise in the morning, then asked if he could take 25 more steps later that day. Soon, he was shuffling down the hall four times a day. On one of his outings, he peeked into another room, where a couple of fellow heart patients lay quietly, IVs in their arms. “Wow, they have it a lot worse than me,” he said to the nurse. “No, actually you have it a lot worse than they do,” she said. “They perceive themselves as heart attack victims. You’re trying to get better.”
When their dedicated machine broke, it sometimes seemed as if it might just break them too, break their will. Like me, some of these people were confronting the final stage, trying to wind down their lives, but they were less well equipped to do it, or didn’t even know how to get started. One patient, awaiting her radiation, barked and occasionally yelled into her cell phone as she paced the waiting room and tended to the details of selling her business. Many of the other patients in the room looked upset by her raving. When she hung up, she turned to all of us. “I’m so sorry,” she said, genuinely. I nodded. I wasn’t upset by her outburst of emotion, or her goal. I understood.
proficiency was not the index I could always use anymore. Or even usually use anymore. Not everyone can perform at the level you’d like. Or that they’d like. They simply can’t, try though they may. Maybe they don’t have the physical energy. Maybe their will is shot. Maybe they’re overwhelmed by what they need to do to make a good break with life. As difficult as my trip to the clinic should have been, I felt that each time I went there, my tolerance for people—that is, my tolerance for imperfection—expanded. I understood better the range of human capability; it was far broader than I’d thought. In my previous life, I’d dealt mostly with people at the top of their game. Now I was dealing with people whose capabilities had been diminished. By disease, doubt, fatigue. Things don’t go according to plan. In fact, they almost never did.
Sitting in that room, waiting for my turn to have the waffle-mask put over my face and then screwed into a table so they could zap my brain with laser beams, I was learning to accept. I had to accept. I had no recourse but to accept. When things didn’t go the way those of us there wanted, I watched people around me grow frustrated. I tried not to let it happen to me. I couldn’t change what was happening, and neither could they. But they were having a far worse time of it by not accepting. As I watched others get upset, I saw myself in my past life. It was at the clinic that I really began to understand acceptance. To accept acceptance, if you will. Having entered the final phase of my life, what choice did I have but to accept it? Apparently, I wasn’t too old to learn something new. You can’t control everything, I told myself, as hard as it was to hear myself, a Type A personality, say those words. I wouldn’t allow mishaps and bad luck and especially a defeating attitude to throw me off my goals, one of which was to try and make every day the best day of my life. The CEO, the micro-manager, needed finally to let go. I closed my eyes. I let go.
Sitting at the dining room table, I made a to-do list for my final days. Get legal and financial affairs in order “Unwind” relationships Simplify Live in the moment Create (but also be open to) great moments, “perfect moments” Begin transition to next state Plan funeral Boiled down, I wanted this last period to be marked by resolution and closure; by heightened awareness; by the pleasure and joy of life. Boiled down still further, I wanted these things, and only these things: Clarity. Intensity. Perfection. What more could anyone hope for, really?
Consciousness, not commitment, was a better, more accurate, less time-entangled word to describe what I was always trying to move toward, from here to the end.
Soon I started to identify whole breeds of people who did not live in the present, despite what they may have believed. They lived either in the future or in the past, or maybe nowhere at all. For example: People who don’t listen, who ask questions without waiting for the whole answers. People who are angry and bitter. People who, like me, thought they were looking at both the forest and the trees, but probably spent a little too much time on the trees. Or was it the forest? Somehow, I had to learn how to be in the present moment, how to live there at least for snippets of time.
In my mind, the future and the past fought until they’d finally muscled out any chance of my experiencing something fresh and totally within my control—the present. Perhaps some of the continuing obsession with the future and the past, or even most of it, was motivated by ego, a basic and lifelong impulse to find one’s slot, to still be seen as a contributing member of society. (How could I let go of that?)
Consciousness is like a muscle, I thought, that would grow stronger when worked on.
Subsequently, I found out I wasn’t far off. Apparently, throughout Great Britain there are “lay lines”—veins in the Earth that give off electromagnetic or gravitational energy. These lay lines have been mapped, and their currents can be measured.
Toward the end of some very good unwindings with friends who were in a bad place, or in lousy marriages, or didn’t believe in some divine being or greater purpose, they wanted to prolong our final encounter. They wanted me to fight my disease more. They told me not to give up; they thought I had. In a couple of cases, they continued to call after the unwinding. They didn’t want me to leave. “I’d like this to be it,” I would say. “I set this up specifically so we could unwind. And we made a perfect moment out of this. Let’s take that and go forward. Let’s not schedule another one. Trying to improve on a perfect moment never works.”
Later, my brother and I talked alone. He was angry—not at me but at life, that this should be happening to me. “Your anger won’t do anyone any good,” I told him. It would dissipate him, I said. He needed to try and live in the present. 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).
I had come to realize that if you conquer your fear, you conquer your death. I had assisted dying patients in understanding that when you are motivated by fear, you are not able to see the best path—whether in death or in life. This had been my clearest message to Gene during the past three months. He was embracing it, finally.