Memoirs aren’t particularly ‘up my alley’ and I have read only a handful over the years, until I came across When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi. Paul’s story is so gripping, I couldn’t put the book down from the moment I started reading it (of course I sobbed throughout the entire book). Spoiler alert: When Breath Becomes Air is a memoir based on Paul’s extraordinary life of being a neurosurgeon battling stage IV metastatic lung cancer. The irony…
“What makes life meaningful enough to go on living?”
“even if I’m dying, until I actually die, I am still living.”
While reading the book, I kept wishing this was fiction and not a memoir; for Paul fought so hard and underwent so many obstacles to become the renounced neurosurgeon he is. When Paul was only 36 years of age, he found himself so close to completing his training as a neurosurgeon and simultaneously battling stage IV lung cancer. The memoir circles around the value and meaning of life; reminding us all that life’s simplest pleasure should not be taken for granted.
“The tricky part of illness is that, as you go through it, your values are constantly changing. You try to figure out what matters to you, and then you keep figuring it out. It felt like someone had taken away my credit card and I was having to learn how to budget. You may decide you want to spend your time working as a neurosurgeon, but two months later, you may feel differently. Two months after that, you may want to learn to play the saxophone or devote yourself to the church. Death may be a one-time event, but living with terminal illness is a process.”
“I began to realize that coming in such close contact with my own mortality had changed both nothing and everything. Before my cancer was diagnosed, I knew that someday I would die, but I didn’t know when. After the diagnosis, I knew that someday I would die, but I didn’t know when. But now I knew it acutely. The problem wasn’t really a scientific one. The fact of death is unsettling. Yet there is no other way to live.”
The book is beautiful, I have no better way to put it into words other than state how beautiful it is. Paul’s life really begins when he studies literature at Stanford and then later enrolls in medical school at Yale; where he meets his wife, Lucy, together they moved to California where they start their residency, later, when Paul is the chief resident at Stanford, the doctor finds himself at the other end of the line, he is now the patient that has just been diagnosed with cancer. Paul details the moment he cried when hearing the news, showing us even doctors who are so knowledgeable of all the state of the art technology present in hospitals are also fragile and vulnerable human beings.
The memoir is written during the last few years of Paul’s life, just another example of many on how determined he was on not letting his illness get the best of him despite the odds. During his residency as a neurosurgeon, Paul starts taking notice of his apparent weight loss, the back spasms and of course being who he is, he had his suspicions that were later confirmed after he and Lucy got off the plane heading back from San Francisco, the x-rays were blurry.
“You can’t ever reach perfection, but you can believe in an asymptote toward which you are ceaselessly striving.”
“Science may provide the most useful way to organize empirical, reproducible data, but its power to do so is predicated on its inability to grasp the most central aspects of human life: hope, fear, love, hate, beauty, envy, honor, weakness, striving, suffering, virtue.”
“Don’t think I ever spent a minute of any day wondering why I did this work, or whether it was worth it. The call to protect life—and not merely life but another’s identity; it is perhaps not too much to say another’s soul—was obvious in its sacredness. Before operating on a patient’s brain, I realized, I must first understand his mind: his identity, his values, what makes his life worth living, and what devastation makes it reasonable to let that life end. 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.”
Something we could all take from this beautifully written memoir, is how fragile life is. Sometimes we may find ourselves so consumed in our everyday life, whether it be striving to be the best at university, endless job applications, dozens of interviews and later being consumed in the corporate world: we forget to live. To live everyday like it’s our last, our only concern becomes our need to meet the next deadline; we may not have tomorrow though, so please enjoy each day, do what makes you happy and what you’re passionate about, even if that is your studies or your job, immerse yourself into them with happiness and content knowing that that’s what makes you happiest in life.
“I expected to feel only empty and heartbroken after Paul died. It never occurred to me that you could love someone the same way after he was gone, that I would continue to feel such love and gratitude alongside the terrible sorrow, the grief so heavy that at times I shiver and moan under the weight of it.”
- REEM INK
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