Book Review - When Breath Becomes Air - Paul Kalanithi
With what strife and pains we come into the world we know not, but ’tis commonly no easy matter to get out of it.” -Sir Thomas Browne, Religio Medici
Paul Kalanithi is approaching the end of a decade of training as a neurosurgeon when he receives the news that he has lung cancer, just before he gets the chance to practice as a fully qualified surgeon. After receiving this devastating news, he decides he’s going to do something that he always wanted to do: write a book. And that’s ‘When breath becomes air’.
Bestseller
It's easy to see why ‘When breath becomes air’ has become a bestseller. He writes so clearly, and you can tell that his first love is literature. He tells his story without self pity and with great integrity, and of the journey from doctor to patient.
It's devastating to see the diagnosis after a decade of gruelling training. Just as he is about to start the next stage of his 20 year plan, he is perparing for his death. What I found incredibly brave was how he returns to neurosrugery for a period - because he could. It was who he was.
The discussions between him and his doctor are informative and revealing - it's hard for him to just be the patient. Throughout the book Kalanithi is constantly searching for meaning, which he finds ultimately in his work. Such a brave book. You really get the sense of him racing against time to get the book finished, as he faces death with such integrity.
Death comes for all of us. It is our fate as living, breathing, metabolizing organisms.
Illuminating
One of the most powerful aspects of this book is that Kalanithi encourages us to face our own mortality. Modern living is so sanitised and death feels like something that we have closed off, put somewhere deep inside ourselves so we don’t have to think or talk about it. Maybe society would be healthier if we talked about it more. People live as if they are gonna be here forever. I know after reading this book it’s been something that I have tried to talk about with the people around me.
Obviously ‘when breath becomes air’ is a tragic book but it is also illuminating on the subject of death - it's bittersweet because you know the outcome, but you really feel close to Paul as he describes his treatment, the birth of his daughter, and his slow deterioration. Such an eloquent and moving epilogue from his wife Lucy, I'm glad I read this book.
When breath becomes air by Paul Kalanithi
208 pages,
January 19, 2016 by Random House
When Breath becomes air quotes
“Human knowledge is never contained in one person. It grows from the relationships we create between each other and the world, and still it is never complete.”
“That message is simple: When you come to one of the many moments in life when 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 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, right now, that is an enormous thing.”
“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 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.”