BookLife Review by Carol O’Day: When Breath Becomes Air (Paul Kalanithi, MD. author, foreword by Abraham Verghese)
Memoir, Pulitzer Prize Finalist, Stanford neurosurgery resident, terminal lung cancer diagnosis, mind-brain connection, documenting cancer treatment and terminal illness.
Impossible and essential topics-death, terminal illness, truncated dreams. Paul Kalanithi was a talented 36 year-old neurosurgery resident when he received his own terminal lung cancer diagnosis. The irony is front and center. He knows all too well that there almost certainly is no magical eleventh-hour salvation in the offing. The deeper irony lies in the fact that before he made a decision to embark upon medical training, he had studied philosophy and literature extensively looking at purposefulness and finding meaning in life and particularly at it’s intersection with death. When Kalanithi decided to study medicine, he retained his interest in the bigger questions and in finding expressions of the interconnectedness of the mind and brain in literature and philosophy. Of course, he never imagined that his own life would prove to be the living and dying example of the principles he had spent his all-too-short life to date investigating in science and the humanities. His diagnosis arrives when he is approaching the 10th and final year of his training.
Kalanithi documents his journey in this stunningly insightful, captivating and short memoir. He describes his richly diverse academic interests and studies prior to medical school, the decisions along his medical training journey which led him to pursue the loftiest and and most exacting of subspecialties–brain surgery (or neurosurgery), the grueling and extensive years of training to become proficient in surgically probing and repairing brains. He then writes about his diagnosis, his emotional and intellectual response to it, and his pivotal, delicate and absolutely central relationship with his oncologist. He deftly portrays his oncologist’s skill at the fine balance between truthfulness and hopefulness that is the hallmark of an excellent oncologist. Ultimately he documents his own decline, the decision to have a child with his physician wife despite his terminal diagnosis, the ups and downs of cancer treatments, the final days of his ability to operate, the mounting of his impairments as the disease progresses and his acceptance of the coming of the end. His wife writes the final chapter, chronicling his final days, his death and the ways his friends and family celebrated his life and remember him.
When Breath Becomes Air is powerfully specific to the life of Dr. Paul Kalanithi. It is uniquely his life, his diagnosis, his treatment course and his death. And yet, it is profoundly universal. We all face death–that of family and friends, and ultimately our own. And yet, we take advantage of far too few opportunities to contemplate and discuss death meaningfully in our American society in particular. When Breath Becomes Air creates not only a safe space to explore it but an important framework for all of us to face death head on, in all of its tragedy, pain, and graphic and humbling debilitating details. We cannot overcome it. We can develop some knowledge and acceptance in order to approach it, hopefully much later in life, so that we can move through it, a loved one’s or our own, with a measure of grace and humility.
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