Yesterday I started reading this book, “When breath becomes air.”  It was a book I couldn’t set down.  What a beautiful, personal, story.  Everyone should read this book.  There were just so many things to love.  What an inspiration.

For those of you who haven’t heard of this story, it is a personal account written by Paul Kalanithi of his life as a neurosurgeon and being diagnosed with stage IV  lung cancer.  It’s truly touching, he is intelligent, thoughtful, and compassionate.   Throughout his life, he is concerned with living a life with meaning.  He truly lived achieved that, from his specialty as a doctor to his relationship with family, friends, his wife, to this very personal story he wrote while dying.

There are so many beautiful quotes in this book. My favorite was when he and his wife were deciding, knowing that he had a terminal illness if they should have a child together.  He wrote….

“Will having a newborn distract from the time we have together?” she asked. “Don’t you think saying goodbye to your child will make your death more painful?”

“Wouldn’t it be great if it did?” I said. Lucy and I both felt that life wasn’t about avoiding suffering.
― Paul Kalanithi, When Breath Becomes Air

This book made me think. I deeply appreciated how he faced, viewed, and discussed death. We live in a culture that doesn’t really know how to talk about it, it’s uncomfortable and people want to avoid it or act like it’s not all of our fate.  He faces death head on and approaches his whole life with meaning, thinking & facing death.

He talked about being raised in Christianity, then becoming a scientist & atheist, and back to Christianity.

“Science may provide the most useful way to organize empirical, reproducible data, but its power to do so is predicated on its inability to grasp the most central aspects of human life: hope, fear, love, hate, beauty, envy, honor, weakness, striving, suffering, virtue.”
― Paul Kalanithi, When Breath Becomes Air

Also, I loved this message to his daughter…

“That message is simple: When you come to one of the many moments in life when you must give an account of yourself, provide a ledger of what you have been, and done, and meant to the world, do not, I pray, discount that you filled a dying man’s days with a sated joy, a joy unknown to me in all my prior years, a joy that does not hunger for more and more, but rests, satisfied. In this time, right now, that is an enormous thing.”
― Paul Kalanithi, When Breath Becomes Air

In terms of grieving, it’s beautiful. His grief of losing the life he thought he would have. His struggles of finding where he belonged in this new unknown chapter of life.  His strength, his wife’s strength, she writes an epilogue and it’s beautiful.  This book to me is inspirational, shows true thoughtfulness, courage and strength.

“I can’t go on. I’ll go on.”
― Paul Kalanithi, When Breath Becomes Air

Those words are so relatable with grief.  A year and a half into my loss I have days where that is exactly how I feel. “I can’t go on. I’ll go on.”  What a beautiful man and a beautiful story.  I hope he and August are friends in heaven.  Thank you for example of courage, passion, and strength.

Love,

Tiffany