When Breath Becomes Air

Publication Date: 5 January 2017

Goodreads Description

At the age of thirty-six, on the verge of completing a decade’s worth of training as a neurosurgeon, Paul Kalanithi was diagnosed with stage IV lung cancer. One day he was a doctor making a living treating the dying, and the next he was a patient struggling to live. Just like that, the future he and his wife had imagined evaporated. When Breath Becomes Air, which features a Foreword by Dr. Abraham Verghese and an Epilogue by Kalanithi’s wife, Lucy, chronicles Kalanithi’s transformation from a naïve medical student “possessed,” as he wrote, “by the question of what, given that all organisms die, makes a virtuous and meaningful life” into a young neurosurgeon at Stanford, guiding patients toward a deeper understanding of death and illness, and finally into a patient and a new father to a baby girl, confronting his own mortality. What makes life worth living in the face of death? What do you do when the future, no longer a ladder toward your goals in life, flattens out into a perpetual present? What does it mean to have a child, to nurture a new life as another fades away? These are some of the questions Kalanithi wrestles with in this profoundly moving, exquisitely observed memoir. Paul Kalanithi died in March 2015, while working on this book, yet his words live on as a guide and a gift to us all. “I began to realize that coming face to face with my own mortality, in a sense, had changed nothing and everything,” he wrote. “Seven words from Samuel Beckett began to repeat in my head: ‘I can’t go on. I’ll go on.’” When Breath Becomes Air is an unforgettable, life-affirming reflection on the challenge of facing mortality and on the relationship between doctor and patient, from a gifted writer who became both.

My Review

Snuggling down onto my favourite couch on a quiet Wednesday evening, I prepared to start this book which I had been dying to read since the hardcover was published in 2016. Well, I managed to get through the foreword before closing the book, gathering my thoughts and contemplating the words I'd just read. I knew then that I was going to be in for a fairly emotional ride.

It's no secret that I'm fascinated by all things medical. I'm curious about the human body, germs, surgeons and surgeries. And so I had a sneaky suspicion I was going to enjoy this book. But here's the thing - you don't need to harbor a secret medical fascination to enjoy this book. Yes, the author was training as a neurosurgeon, but this book isn't strictly about that. It's a book about mortality, about life, about death, about living, about hopes and dreams, about what constitutes a meaningful life. For me, in a way, this was also a tiny downside to the book. I say this because there are parts of this book that are very philosophical. I would actually refer to this book as an "intellectual" read. Although this book does read like a story and although the author does tell the reader about his journey to becoming a neurosurgeon, including giving examples of things he saw and patients he treated, the book is very much a discussion about life, about what it means to have lived a good life and about how to face death. And yes, I did enjoy those discussions but I was more fascinated by the medical side to the story, and the human side. About how it felt to receive such a terrible diagnosis, to have to give up your "calling" and the career that you had trained so hard for, to know that your death was closer than you ever could have imagined.

But let me tell you something, this is a wonderful read. It's a book that made me get up in the morning, dress for work, get into the traffic, think about the files on my desk and everything I had to get done that day, and actually feel happy about it. This book made me feel happy to be alive, to have my health, to know that all my loved ones had their health, to be in a position where I was able to go to work and worry about mundane things. One question kept ringing in my head while reading this book - "why are some people given wonderful lives and other's not?". This is a book that will make you think about that a lot. And as we all know, there is no answer to that question. It's a great read. Sad but wonderful.

My rating: * * * *

Many thanks to Penguin Random House SA, Penguin UK as well as to the author and Lucy, for my review copy.