When Breath Becomes Air is written by Paul Kalanithi and is a deeply moving memoir written during what was supposed to be the prime of his life. He was to be a neurosurgeon-scientist.
With a title that poignant and spoiling the book’s ending, I cried only during the Epilogue of When Breath Becomes Air. I suppose this speaks to how Paul wanted his book to be written:
Not the sensationalism of dying, and not exhortations to gather rosebuds, but: Here’s what lies up ahead on the road
He did it well. He was clear in his prose, with sentences that struck me as honest and at times brutal. Paul did not go into hyperbole about what he was going through, he had a message and he told it.
We are all given death sentences. We live, ignoring it until we have to accept it. Yet, we live until we die.
[…] seeing death as an imposing itinerant vistor but knowing that even if I’m dying, until I actually die, I am still living.
Paul divided his book into two chapters. In one, he talked about his journey towards neurosurgery - one of searching for the meaning of life, death and his drive to be more than a mere spectator. In the next, he details his slow decline, dying but not yet dead.
Paul wrote with the perspective of being a physician and a patient at the same time. He remarked on how much doctors know about the patients’ circumstances yet ironically how little they really know about what it means to be a patient until walking a mile as one.
Perhaps he didn’t intend for this to be a reminder for medical staff, but I took it as such: that empathy to patients is not so much as knowing what they go through, but to be present, understanding and being a guide.
Thank you for the book.
May you rest in peace.