When Breath Becomes Air

The cover page reads....Rattling, Heartbreaking, Beautiful

I'd add Poignant, Honest, Courageous, Incisive...... it now definitely stands appended to my list of books that touched deep.

The book found it's way into my hands. When I first heard about it, I walked into Walden, and it was there, but was hard bound and expensive, both tough...and I walked away. Yet within the month, I found it in my hands. Providential kinds.

Paul Kalanithi, a neurosurgeon, at age thirty six, on the verge of completing ten years of rigorous training, is diagnosed with fourth degree lung cancer. Over night from being a doctor, he finds himself a patient, in the very same hospital, staring death in the face.

Through the book we see his journey as a passionate young student with, in his own words, the burning question "what makes human life meaningful....what, given that all organisms die, makes a virtuous and meaningful life".

And he ruthlessly seeks.... through a masters in literature from Stanford, a masters in philosophy from Cambridge, Medicine at Yale, and while doing medicine thought he'd find his answer in psychiatry, and how he finally fell in love with neurosurgery, and went back to Stanford for a postdoctoral fellowship in neurosurgery. 

And through all this he holds on to the yearning to become a writer. And it's so poignant when he says he had postponed learning how to live while pursuing neurosurgery, and by the time he was ready to enjoy a life outside the operating room, what he needed to learn was how to die. 

He writes with extraordinary sensitivity of his experience through med school, cadaver dissections and the humanity of a corpse.......... humaneness in dealing with a patient....and fascination for the complexity of neuroscience.

Then came his own struggle with the cancer.....how core strength and vulnerability juxtapose and intertwine......how a marriage on the verge of breaking, found it's bonding through the fight with cancer, and even the struggle to write the book as he had to use silver lined gloves towards the end, as the chemotherapy had started to crack his finger tips.

His writing itself, which while sharp and cuts deep, is at times almost poetic in beauty.

And finally there's his own death, as the manuscript had to be completed posthumously.

As said in the preface "Listen to Paul. In the silences between his word, listen to what you have to say back". There's no reading and forgetting this book.