WHEN BREATH BECOMES AIR

I kept imagining living a life of being both a neurosurgeon and a patient, like how Paul did, but I ended up being stuck in that situation. That was what When breath becomes air by Paul Kalanithi brought to me after reading the book - a book of his life.

It was not until 2019 that I began to read the book, though it has been published since 2016. My first impression about this book is that it is written by a guy graduating from Stanford with a Literature degree, then after that Yale with another one of Neuroscience. The author, Paul Kalanithi, is the one with the blend of both romance and science as well as heart and mind. Honestly, I did not plan to read this book as I previously thought it is similar to some others with cliches and due to all the hype it got, until I myself experienced it. Why didn’t I read this earlier?

The feeling I have from the book is best described in the phrase: listening to the story of a neurosurgeon about his lung cancer. Sounds hard to accept the fact, but it’s true. Thoughout every page of When breath becomes air, there is no drama, no striking climax though it is about life and death. It is all about how a 40-year-old-to-be doctor experience, think and conceive the value of life and the end of it. I was expecting dramatic expressions or the scene of people struggling to dead when being diagnosed cancer, which may make me not wanting to read the story anymore, but it turned out to have nothing like that. It is just how you know about it, you cannot accept it, but eventually what comes will come, and people can no longer hide from those things.

The way Paul dealt with death is different from usual stages. People first cannot believe in the reality, then they strive for another possible solution, then fail, and accept it. But Paul, he simply accepts the fact that he has a cancer, but then he ended up seeking in despair a way that may help. Cancer can ruin a patient’s life, and ruin a family’s future. But what can people do apart from accepting it?

Paul has been spending his life wondering and thinking about the meaning of life:“ I was driven less by achievement than by trying to understand, in earnest: What makes human life meaningful?” At first, he considered Philosophy and Literature the way to have access to the root of life’s meaning, but then he discovered that he loved to be in the line between life and death, which only being a neurosurgeon could do. He devoted all his time for working, for helping people, for climbing to the climax of success, but his life was to stop there, at the age of 38.

I cried when I read the note he sent to his little daughter, Cady:’’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."

It is hard to say how amazing, meaningful and brilliant this piece of literature is. I’m speechless, honestly. So shut your phone down and read it.