When Breath Becomes Air – What a wonderful book!

It is an autobiographical story of the writer Dr. Paul Kalanithi. His journey is unbelievable and heartbreaking. BA and MA in English literature from Stanford to study medicine at Yale was a relatively smooth part of this academic journey. When he was about to become a neurosurgeon after putting in years of effort, he was shocked to find himself with advanced lung cancer.

It was his dream to write his book, and he managed to complete it, but he didn’t have time to see it published.

The book is about his journey as a medical student to residency in neurosurgery at Stanford, the relationship between doctor and patient, and his reflection on facing death.

Here are a few extracts from the book.

As a neurosurgeon, sometimes, a decision to be made together with the patient and family to go for an operation or not go for it. He writes:

“Because the brain mediates our experience of the world, any neurosurgical problem forces a patient and family, ideally with a doctor as a guide, to answer this question: What makes life meaningful enough to go on living?”

“The cost of my dedication to succeed was high, and the ineluctable failures brought me nearly unbearable guilt. Those burdens are what make medicine holy and wholly impossible: in taking up another’s cross, one must sometimes get crushed by the weight.”

When he comes to know that his days are numbered, he reflects philosophically: “I would have to learn to live in a different way, seeing death as an imposing itinerant visitor but knowing that even if I’m dying, until I actually die, I am still living.”

Lucy Goddard Kalanithi, his wife has written the epilogue and I have never read more powerful and heartfelt epilogue than this. This one really moved me:

“Paul’s decision not to avert his eyes from death epitomizes a fortitude we don’t celebrate enough in our death-avoidant culture. His strength was defined by ambition and effort, but also by softness, the opposite of bitterness. He spent much of his life wrestling with the question of how to live a meaningful life, and his book explores that essential territory. “Always the seer is a sayer,” Emerson wrote. “Somehow his dream is told; somehow he publishes it with solemn joy.” Writing this book was a chance for this courageous seer to be a sayer, to teach us to face death with integrity.”