Eugene O'Kelly: Chasing Daylight: How My Forthcoming Death Transformed My Life

Profiled in the Feb 27, 2006 issue of Business week magazine:

In the spring of, 2005 Eugene O'Kelly was chairman and chief executive of KPMG International, where he had worked for three decades. He was 52, at the peak of his career when he was diagnosed with inoperable late-stage brain cancer and, although his doctors didn't tell him directly, he didn't expect to live past the summer. He died on Sept. 10. During the 100 days between his diagnosis and his death, he worked with his wife Corrine and writer Andrew Postman to document his attempt to face death with as much brightness and hope, as possible. The book, Chasing Daylight: How My Forthcoming Death Transformed My Life was published at the end of 2005.

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."

He quickly resigned from KPMG and started radiation treatment. In his final days he focused on getting his legal and financial affairs in order, unwinding relationships, simply, living in the moment, creating and being open to great moments. He began to meditate, with the guidance of Corrine to develop the mental discipline they both believed he would need in those last moments of life. It was during a morning meditation, while sitting in the courtyard of a museum of medieval art with a fountain running in the background that he told her he wanted the two of them to write a book about his dying.

Corinne was initially ambivalent about the book: At the time she was managing Gene's medical care, meeting with lawyers, concerned about their daughters Gina and Marianne. She knew the project would sap Gene's energy. But he wanted to share what he called his spiritual journey, and to leave this for his daughters. Corinne says, "The last gift I could give him was to let him do it his way and to make his dying as beautiful as possible." From that moment until the last week of his life, Gene wrote 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. That summer the firm admitted to criminal tax fraud and agreed to pay $456 million in penalties, a settlement that he had been working on. 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.

One of Gene's hopes, as he said was to, "to unwind" relationships of all kinds. He placed his many colleagues, friends, and family in five concentric circles; those closest to him were in the innermost ring. He began to say goodbye through e-mail, phone conversations, walks in Central Park, or over a good bottle of wine. He wanted the conversations to be positive, to focus on what he had learned. Toward the end, he says, he realized that during his previous life as a business leader he might have been "too consumed by the outermost circle." As he puts it: "Perhaps I could have found the time, in the last decade, to have had a weekday lunch with my wife more than...twice?... I realized that being able to count a thousand people in that fifth circle was not something to be proud of. It was something to be wary of."

Some have questioned O'Kelly's choice to use what little time he had left saying goodbye to so many people rather than focusing on those closest to him. I look on Chasing Daylight as a cautionary tale for those of us, including myself, who are overly attentive to the distractions of this world. In the greater scheme of things, time is transient. We only have the present moment. In the context of eternity, is there such a big difference between 100 days and 100 years?

servus humillimus domini