Am I working to build and nurture the relationships and love that makes life important?
“Seven words from Samuel Beckett began to repeat in my head: ‘I can’t go on. Click here to buy Paul Kalanithi’s nonfiction book, When Breath Becomes Air.
“I studied literature and philosophy to understand what makes life meaningful, studied neuroscience and worked in an fMRI lab to understand how the brain could give rise to an organism capable of finding meaning in the world, and enriched my relationships with a circle of dear friends through various escapades.”, Kalanithi ultimately became a doctor to answer life’s most important question: “What makes human life meaningful?” He finds something of an answer in the marriage of literature and neuroscience. Kalanithi asks the doctor, “Which is worse, being born too early or waiting too long to deliver?” The doctor explains that it is a judgement call. I'm Janice Greenwood, a writer based in Honolulu, Hawaii. The doctor sees one, the patient another, the engineer a third, the economist a fourth, the pearl diver a fifth, the alcoholic a sixth, the cable guy a seventh, the sheep farmer an eighth, the Indian beggar a ninth, the pastor a tenth… Human knowledge… grows from the relationships we create…”. The doctor chose to deliver.
Kalanithi's wisdom lay in wrestling with the toughest questions humans can ask of themselves, even if they go unanswered. Life, for him, could not be reduced to a punchline, and he knew that even if running away from someone else’s tragedy might save his sanity, it left in its wake a world of suffering. He makes no effort to find a reason in his death. “…literature provided the best account of the life of the mind, while neuroscience laid down the most elegant rules of the brain.” In literature, Kalanithi finds “the richest material for moral reflection.”.
We can sit and meditate on how we want to live our lives, to acknowledge that our answers will be imperfect. It is one of the few books I have read more than a couple of times. He spent his days among the sick and dying, but he had long ago come to terms with this, bringing to bear his training and skilled hands on those he could save; offering mercy to those he could not. He indulged in the turning away and in the black humor that people in white coats sometimes embrace as a way to deal with the tragedies they must confront. Some nonfiction books, however, can offer us a road map for living. 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. Or, in the words of Mary Oliver, “Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?” The answer for each of us is unique, shaped by our experiences in the world, by our goals, and by our values. He finally learned what was important by living it, and he did his best to share it with the rest of us. 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. Join my mailing list to receive more book recommendations via e-mail. How do we approach life’s judgement calls with the resources to make a wise decision?
Others in a similar position might be tempted to sanitize their life. Yet Kalanithi was better than that, and he knew it. It was the kind of perfection that drove him to be a neurosurgeon, a line of work with little room for error but where one could save lives, salvage damaged minds and perhaps come to a greater understanding of one’s fellow man. I believe the hardest choices in life are the ones most likely to get us stuck. But, at some point, in the near future, we will need to ask ourselves what kind of society we want to build, what kind of world we’ll want to re-build, and more immediately, what kind of lives we want to live in the aftermath. Ruminations on time, the meaning of life and the nature of being fill these pages, and do so with an easy grace that belies the writer’s desperate straits at the time of composition. Kalanithi’s search for authenticity is uncompromising.
Kalanithi has recorded a moving tale of the arduous demands that terminal illness brings upon a family. Fortunately, we can start to think about these things now.
“Doctors in highly charged fields met patients at inflected moments, the most authentic moments, where life and identity were under threat; their duty included learning what made that particular patient’s life worth living, and planning to save those things if possible—or to allow the peace of death if not.”. Right now, socially distancing ourselves from one another is the best option we have as a society to save lives and stop the spread of disease. Kalanithi died before finishing the memoir in March 2015, at age 37. You will watch as lung cancer annihilates his dreams of becoming a renowned neurosurgeon and doctor-philosopher. I’m Janice Greenwood, a freelance writer based in Honolulu, Hawaii. 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. This supports my work and also supports local bookstores.
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