When Breath Becomes air by Paul Kalanithi

"Even if I am dying, 

Unit I actually die,

I'm still living"

Paul Kalanithi 

Everyone of us has a plan for life. We pick our (or maybe our parent’s) choice of subject, study hard, find a good job, get married, have children, get a promotion (only if we are really good) and basically live our lives like everyone does. What if suddenly fate deals us a bad hand and we realize that we only have a couple of months to live? Will we give up and feel sorry for ourselves? Well I’m guessing most of us will! Or will we fight it and try to change our situation? Or will we accept it, make the best of it and live whatever is left of our life to its fullest?

Questions like these are hard to answer, but think about it. I did, when I read “When Breath Becomes air” by Paul Kalanithi. To give you a gist of the book; “at the age of thirty-six, on the verge of completing a decade’s worth of training as a neurosurgeon, Paul Kalanithi was diagnosed with stage IV lung cancer. One day he was a doctor treating the dying, and the next he was a patient struggling to live.”    

“When breath becomes air chronicles Kalanithi’s transformation from a naive medical student ‘possessed,’ as he wrote, ‘by the question of what, given that all organisms die, makes a virtuous and meaningful life’ into a neurosurgeon at Stanford working in the brain, and finally into a patient and a new father confronting his own mortality.”

This book is about Kalanithi and about all of us as well. The book touched a raw nerve in a sense. I was rattled, shaken, miserable, crying at times; but also so aware of my own life and surroundings. I have a family that loves me, a husband who supports and encourages me, two children who adore me and friends who add joy to life. All this is mine now; but how long will I have it. Am I truly living my life to the fullest? I kept questioning my contribution to the world, I kept asking myself if I had truly maxed my potential and I kept wondering if I would be but a mere drop in the ocean or the wave that runs up the shore?  

This is one book that I took a long time to finish, because I kept going back and forth; reading and rereading and mulling about my own existence!

I loved the emphasis on reading that Kalanithi makes right at the start where he talks about his mother. ‘Trained in India to be a psychologist, married at twenty-three, and preoccupied with raising three kids in a country that was not her own, she had not read many of the books on the list (college prep reading list). But she would make sure her kids were not deprived.”

Walking into high or multi-specialty hospitals we often wonder why Doctors are such hard nuts to crack! Why they don’t smile often or why they are not friendly enough! Kalanithi sums it up by saying ‘Cadaver dissection epitomizes, for many, the transformation of the somber; respectful student into the callous, arrogant doctor.’

Like I said, this is one book that had me returning to previous pages to reread a paragraph and as I write this review..I actually sat back a reread a few more chapters. That's what unique about this book.

Paul is no more, he died in March 2015. However as mentioned by Abraham Verghese in his foreword, “I got to know Paul only after his death. .. I came to know him most intimately when he’d ceased to be.” Similarly I too feel like I know Paul! Somewhere, somehow he connected with me, spoke to me and left me in tears for a friend I lost!

I’d recommend this book a 100%. Read it for Paul, read it to understand that immortality is only hear-say, read it to connect with your true self, and read it because it is worth reading.

I close with a few quotes from the book.

"... amid that unique suffering involved by severe brain damage, the suffering often felt more by families than by patients, it is not merely the physicians who do not see the full significance. The families who gather around their beloved - their beloved whose sheared head contained battered brains - do not usually recognize the full significance either. They see the past, the accumulation of memories, the freshly felt love, all represented by the body in before them."

"Let no man put asunder what God has joined."

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