When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi
Rating: ★★★★★★★★☆☆ 8/10
During this quarantine, I have often found myself alone with my thoughts of what my future was going to look like. I don’t think I was alone in this — many of my friends had similar reckonings: what did they actually want to do with their careers, with their lives? Coronavirus has paused all our lives, and it has forced us to spend unprecedented amounts of time alone or with immediately family. I think we’ve self-reflected so much during quarantine because the disease has cast a cloud of uncertainty over our futures, and we’re desperately trying to find that clarity again.
Paul Kalanithi writes about a similar, obviously much more life-altering, period of his life, in his memoir, When Breath Becomes Air. His meteoric rise in the field of neurosurgery and neuroscience was cut short by his diagnosis of lung cancer. He was just 35 when he was diagnosed, before he had even graduated residency at Stanford and before he even got a chance to start his “real” life. During this period, he needs to decide what he wants to do with the remainder of his time. The trouble is, he doesn’t know exactly how much time he has left: it could be two months, or twenty years, and nothing can prepare him for this. He had studied at the top schools, researched with the pioneers in his field, and worked alongside the best of the best doctors, and yet nothing could have prepared him for his struggle with cancer, groping in the darkness for meaning and purpose.
He writes a lot about death — how you don’t quite understand it (no matter how much you read about it) until you are at its door. The little peculiarities and nuances that simply can’t be verbalized or memorialized because words might destroy their ephemerality. And yet, as many other readers of this book have pointed out, this book is more about life. Paul is able to use the last years of his life to write the memoir, and in the last year, he and his wife have a daughter. Family and close friends are his world as he nears death. This is not a new concept, nor is it a call for everyone to put their careers second while they are still young and healthy. It is just a reminder that you can have everything, but when the realities of life strike, everything might not mean all that much.
Now obviously Paul’s experience with cancer is incomparable to what we’re experiencing during coronavirus. But just as he reflected more on his life than his impending death in his last years, we can also appreciate what we’ve had up until now, rather than focus on what the quarantine is taking away.
I liked the writing the entire way through the book. I didn’t really enjoy the foreword, because a) the dude barely even knew Paul and b) it provided no substance to the book whatsoever. Paul was a great writer (he got an MA in English from Stanford after all), and his wife, Lucy, is also a great writer. In her epilogue, she describes Paul’s last months, and life after his death. It’s a great conclusion to this story.
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