Living a meaningful life
As he faced terminal cancer, neurosurgeon decided his time would not be wasted in despair
Paul Kalanithi is no longer living, but he has left us with a treasure. “Words have a longevity I do not.” His memoir, When Breath Becomes Air, is a remarkable and poignant meditation on the meaning of life in the face of a looming death.
Kalanithi, a highly-accomplished neurosurgeon and writer, was diagnosed with terminal cancer just as he was entering the final year of his neurosurgical training. Everything he had been working towards was finally coming to fruition; he was ready to devote himself to being a good husband: “By age thirty-six, I had reached the mountaintop; I could see the Promised Land, from Gilead to Jericho to the Mediterranean Sea.”
Yet the path that was once so clear had swerved into the uncertainty of disease.
Kalanithi’s stunning and thoughtful prose reveals a brave and piercingly honest vulnerability as he makes the transition from doctor to patient. The first part of his memoir looks back on his life. Before he decided to pursue medicine and neurosurgery, Kalanithi thought he wanted to be a writer. “What makes a human life meaningful?” He asked himself this question as he was completing an undergraduate degree in English literature and human biology.
He was not simply searching for meaning, but actual experiences that made sense of the life-and-death conundrum. This is what led him to neurosurgery, where the question evolved into “What makes life meaningful enough to go on?”
Kalanithi lived by Socrates’ famous dictum that the “unexamined life is not worth living.” In the face of death, he refused to forget that he was still living. His time, as little or as long as he had, would not be wasted in despair, “even if I am dying, until I actually die, I am still living.”
The reality is that we are all going to die. Yet discussions about death are still uncomfortable because we fear the uncertainty within the certainty of death. Dying from an illness not only forces a person to come to terms with humanity’s shared fate, but also consider the quality of the life they are striving for: “the question is not simply whether to live or die but what kind of life is worth living.”
As I read When Breath Becomes Air, I could feel myself changing, and recognizing all that I take for granted. This is the gift that Kalanithi has bestowed upon his reader, the realization that time is not mere increments to be passed, but a state of being. Every moment should be cherished, or at the very least, lived. Safa Jinje is a writer and editor living in Toronto. Follow her on Twitter: @Safajinje