‘When Breath Becomes Air’ by Paul Kalanithi is not a story of dying. Contrary to popular perception, it’s not entirely a story about living either.
What it is, at its unstripped core, is a story of love. Of all the different ways it can bless and enrich our lives. Of the beauty and depth it brings to our severely limited days on the planet. Of the enormous strength, it can empower us, to face life’s choicest challenges, and come out on the other side, still smiling, still believing.
This memoir tells the story of a brilliant neurosurgeon—Paul, himself—who, at the height of his career, is diagnosed with terminal lung cancer. Through this poignant journey that overlaps with those of his friends, family, and colleagues, he reflects on what makes life worth living and what it means to truly love. Reading the book feels like setting up camp inside the beautifully galactic swirl of his complex thoughts.
Paul’s fascination with the questions that lie at the intersection of the mind, the body, and the soul propel him toward a path where he discovers not just a career that promises answers but also a whole self that was hitherto revealed to him only in bits and pieces. His love for neurosurgery and the role it plays in his quest for answers about morality in the face of mortality takes up the bulk of the narrative in the first half.
The second half of the book gives way to the blossoming of other kinds of love. After his diagnosis, and as he mourns the loss of the future he had envisioned for himself as a surgeon, there is a subtle and understandable shift in his priorities. As he and his wife, Lucy, plan a family and are blessed with their daughter, Cady, he reflects on how life’s meaning is a mosaic of plurality and not a singular, isolated entity. Born of the joy his family brings him, the legacy he hopes to leave for his daughter (and his readers) is the lesson that life is not measured in years, but in the moments we spend with the people we love.
Then there’s his love for life itself, evident in his signing up for the fiercest of treatments—first, second, and third-line treatments against the rogue cells encroaching upon his body—putting his body and his spirit through painful recovery only to be pulled back into the black hole of relapse. He writes, “I would have to learn to live in a different way, seeing death as an imposing itinerant visitor but knowing that even if I’m dying until I actually die, I am still living.”
When I began reading this book, my friends warned me that it would hurt me emotionally, as books around death and dying usually do. Surprisingly, it wasn’t Paul’s story itself but the epilogue written by his wife after he succumbed, leaving the manuscript unfinished, that finally moved me to tears. It’s as multi-faceted, as full of feeling—waves of longing and gratitude and heartache—as the book itself. A true ode to their undying love for each other, at first tested and then strengthened by their shared adversity.
“What happened to Paul was tragic, but he was not a tragedy,” she concludes. Because a life lived for and with the gift of love never is.
Overall, ‘When Breath Becomes Air’ is a powerful and heartbreaking book that will stay with you long after you’ve finished it, making you go back to its pages for its wisdom, over and over.
Kalanithi’s writing is thoughtful and reflective, and his insights are both comforting and challenging, as you can expect from a man who’s had to face his own mortality juxtaposed against his bringing a new life into the world. I highly recommend this book to anyone who wants to be reminded of the ironic combination of vulnerability and courage that being human is.
Book Reviewer:
Garima is a writer, content strategist, and marketer with a penchant for languages and travelling. She can speak (nearly) 5 languages and has travelled to over 50 cities. Her work experience ranges from diplomatic not-for-profit organizations to early-stage startups and more. She is a polymath who also hoards (and reads) books obsessively. You can read more from her on her LinkedIn and Instagram profiles.