Chasing Daylight: How My Forthcoming Death Transformed My Life (UK Edt)

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Chasing Daylight is the honest, touching, and ultimately inspirational memoir of former KPMG CEO Eugene O''Kelly, completed in the three and a half months between his diagnosis with brain cancer and his death in September 2005. It’s haunting yet extraordinarily hopeful voice reminds us to embrace the fragile, fleeting moments of our lives: the brief time we have with our family, our friends, and even ourselves. Glimpse the strategies Gene embraced to accept and live the final stages of his life with vibrancy and calm - and what his preparations for death taught him about life.

This paperback edition features a new foreword by his wife, Corinne O''Kelly and a readers'' group guide and questions

“A moving memoir” The Times
“Challenging and thought-provoking” The Financial Times
“[A] well-written and moving book.” The Economist.com
"Voicing universal truths not often found in business or how-to tracts...[O''Kelly] made a success out of his final mission."-Janet Maslin, The New York Times

As CEO at accounting giant KPMG, Eugene O'Kelly was so immersed in his job that over the course of a decade, he managed to have lunch with his wife on weekdays just twice. His travel schedule was set 18 months out. Once, he was so obsessed with impressing a potential client that he tracked down the man's travel schedule, booked the seat next to him on a flight, schmoozed the guy all the way to Australia, landed the account, and flew immediately back to Manhattan. His Type-A ways vanished when, at age 53, a top neurosurgeon in New York told him he had late-stage brain cancer. "His eyes told me I would die soon. It was late spring. I had seen my last autumn in New York." 

There are no TV-movie-style miracle treatments or extensions of his life expectancy; he's told he has maybe 3 months, and he doesn't spend any energy hoping for a cure. True to his CEO style, he creates goals for himself, lists of friends to visit for the last time; he meditates; he tries to create as many "perfect Moments" that he can, during dinner or phone conversations with friends, and realized how rare those moments of connection and joy were in his "previous life." Chasing Daylight is as much a self-criticism of his job-before-family ways as it is a meditation on time and a transition to a tranquil, spiritual state utterly foreign to him as a CEO. O'Kelly's absolutely more fulfilled by the soul work that he finishes in 100 days, compared to his 30 years of corporate promotions and accolades, and he utterly convinces readers to ponder their own situation, whether "in the gloaming" of life as he was or not. --Erica Jorgensen