Paul Kalanithi was a Neurosurgeon who, at the age of 36 and, on the verge of completing a decade’s worth of training, is diagnosed with stage 4 lung cancer. When Breath Becomes Air is a fascinating chronicle of his life, his reflections on life’s meaning and his struggle to learn how to die.
Paul was “driven less by achievement than by trying to understand… what makes human life meaningful”. He studied English literature because “it provided the best account of the mind, while neuroscience laid down the most elegant rules of the brain.” However, his “scholarly study of human meaning would conflict with his urge to forge and strengthen the human relationships that formed that meaning. If the unexamined life was not worth living, was the unlived life worth examining?”
He became a neurosurgeon because of neurosurgery’s “unforgiving call to perfection…it seemed to present the most challenging and direct confrontation with meaning, identity and death.” However, the demands of the neurosurgical training are severe and Dr Kalanithi worked for more than 100 hours per week. His story shows us that postponing life, for whatever reason, is a waste. By the time he was ready to enjoy life he needed to learn how to die.
Towards the end of his life Paul and his wife Lucy, also a doctor, decided to have a child even though they knew it would make his death more painful. Their daughter was 8 months old when he died. He says that “there is perhaps only one thing to say to this infant, who is all future, overlapping briefly with me, whose life, barring the improbable, is all but past.” His message to his daughter is is extremely beautiful and memorable. It is
“When you come to one of the many moments in life where you must give an account of yourself, provide a ledger of what you have been and done, and meant to the world do not, I pray, discount that you have filled a dying man’s days with a sated joy, a joy unknown to me in all my prior years, a joy that does not hunger for more and more but rests, satisfied. In this time, now, that is an enormous thing.”
The epilogue is written by Lucy Kalanithi after Paul died on 9th March, 2015. Her descriptions of their final struggles, last moments together and his final resting place are heartbreaking. Tears easily come as you realise that this wonderful human being is gone. His book, however, will remain his legacy and his daughter will have its contents and wonderful message to better know her dad.
This book is truly a wonderful read. You can get it at Booktopia.