‘To help people gave him a purpose’

When neurosurgeon Paul Kalanithi was diagnosed with terminal cancer at just 36, he used his last months to write an extraordinary memoir of his illness and thoughts on approaching death. Heather Hodson meets his widow

Diagnosed with cancer in his 30s, the neurosurgeon Paul Kalanithi decided to write a remarkable memoir about his life and thoughts on impending death. By Heather Hodson

‘at frst the grief was so crushing i thought, i cannot believe this

is part and parcel of being human’ Neurosurgeon Paul Kalanithi with his wife Lucy and baby daughter Cady

in July 2014, seven months before his death

h e was bizarrely, uniquely ready to write this book,’ s ays Lucy Kala nit hi of

When Breath Becomes Air, the remarkable memoir written by her husband, a br il l i a nt neu rosu r geon named Paul Kalanithi, in t he mont hs before he died, aged 37, from lung cancer. ‘He had these big existential questions that were not theoretical any more, swirling around.’ We are sitting at the kitchen table of her friend’s apartment in Brooklyn, the thin January light fltering through the window. In New York for the memoir’s promotional tour, she is fulflling a promise she made to Kalanithi when it became clear he wouldn’t live long enough to see his words in print. ‘The end came so fast, he deteriorated very quickly, so we basically had this period of 12 hours to make decisions about his death and exchange some words. One sentence of it was, “Can you publish my book?”’ Lucy says, her voice faltering.

It is less than a year since Kalanithi passed away, surrounded by family, in a hospital bed in the intensive care unit at Stanford University in California, where he had been chief resident in neurological surgery mere months before. For his 36-year-old widow, time seems barely to have passed.

‘I will say a year is nothing; I’m shocked. At frst the grief was so crushing I thought, I cannot believe this is part and parcel of being human.’ Tall and willowy, with a lovely, intelligent face, her blue eyes fll up intermittently throughout our conversation. ‘Someone said the book was “crackling with life”, and I loved it because… ’ She pauses and swallows hard. ‘This is going to bring tears to my eyes, but even when Paul was wasted [with cancer] and looked like an old man he was totally crackling with life. His mental state was alive. He didn’t die until he died.’

Kalanit hi wrote When Breath Becomes Air in t he last 22 months of his life and what he has left behind is a luminous, revelatory memoir about mortality and what makes being alive meaningful. Life, birth, disease and death are examined with