What the words of a dying doctor taught me about life’s meaning

BY REBECCA RUIZ

when-breath-becomes-air

When I learned of the late Paul Kalanithi’s memoir When Breath Becomes Air, which published earlier this year, I felt drawn to its premise. A young doctor with great ambition receives a terminal cancer diagnosis and reports back from the twilight of his life on his quest to seek and find meaning.

Feeling unsure of my own purpose in life, I wanted Kalanithi’s journey to become a beacon to guide my own wandering. Perhaps, I hoped, he might be some kind of oracle.

But that is not the design of Kalanithi’s gripping, emotional book. You, dear reader, are not meant to passively observe Kalanithi’s final moments, glean his wisdom and walk away feeling assured in your path.

Instead you will bear witness to his yearning, suffering and grace. You will watch as lung cancer annihilates his dreams of becoming a renowned neurosurgeon and doctor-philosopher. You will ask yourself if you’ve ever worked as hard as Kalanithi, who commits himself to relentless hours as a medical resident performing high-stake surgeries — even as he tries to dodge death.

As unbearable as that sounds, the pull of this narrative is magnetic. More than a year into parenthood, I hadn’t finished a single book — yet I could barely put down When Breath Becomes Air. Almost nothing else felt as important.

That the book demands your presence is a credit to Kalanithi’s captivating prose. Whether he is describing in vivid detail a midnight hike in the Eldorado National Forest (“pitch-black, stars in full glimmer, the full moon still pinned in the sky”) or his desire to bridge the worlds of literature and neurosurgery (“I had come to see language as an almost supernatural force”), Kalanithi’s sentences are both urgent and poetic.

Others in a similar position might be tempted to sanitize their life. Here’s a man who is candid about his marital troubles. He confesses that he finds himself drifting into becoming a doctor who just goes through the motions:

All my occasions of failed empathy came rushing back to me: the times I had pushed discharge over patient worries, ignored patients’ pain when other demands pressed. The people whose suffering I saw, noted, and neatly packaged into various diagnoses, the significance of which I failed to recognize — they all returned, vengeful, angry and inexorable.

Kalanithi even admits that he suspected cancer months prior to the official diagnosis. His account would have been richer with an exploration of why he dismissed those prescient instincts, but the reader can’t fault a man who has so little time for self-examination.

When Breath Becomes Air is an imperfect book, but it draws its power and permanency from those limitations.

Kalanithi died before finishing the memoir in March 2015, at age 37. His final passage is a moving dedication to his infant daughter (and is followed by an explanatory epilogue from his wife). But before he writes those tender words, he leaves the reader with a gift of their own:

Everyone succumbs to finitude. I suspect I am not the only one who reaches this pluperfect stage. Most ambitions are either achieved or abandoned; either way, they belong to the past. The future, instead of the ladder toward the goals of life, flattens out into a perpetual present. Money, status, all the vanities the preacher of Ecclesiastes described hold so little interest: a chasing after wind, indeed.

Kalanithi makes no attempt at reassurance. The end is not tidy or filled with comforting platitudes. He makes no effort to find a reason in his death. I had read every page with anticipation, waiting for Kalanithi to share adages born of introspection and tragedy, I had missed the point all together.

Kalanithi’s wisdom lay in wrestling with the toughest questions humans can ask of themselves, even if they go unanswered. That bravery, standing at the edge of the abyss with fortitude, is what gives us meaning. And it’s what made Kalanithi a courageous doctor and human being.

When Breath Becomes Air is essential reading in a world where we try so hard to exercise control over the unpredictable. While the miracles of science and technology are worthy of our praise, we lose something vital when we forsake ambiguity for certainty.

Kalanithi understood that we learn who we are when we remain still in moments of confusion and crisis, when we pause to ask the terrifying questions. And then we keep moving forward even when it feels impossible.

“I began to realize that coming face to face with my own mortality, in a sense, had changed nothing and everything,” Kalanithi wrote. “Seven words from Samuel Beckett began to repeat in my head: ‘I can’t go on. I’ll go on.’”

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