

AS soon as the CT scan was done, I began reviewing the images. The diagnosis was immediate: Masses matting the lungs and deforming the spine. Cancer. In my neurosurgical training, I had reviewed hundreds of scans for fellow doctors to see if surgery offered any hope. I’d scribble in the chart “Widely metastatic disease — no role for surgery,” and move on. But this scan was different: It was my own.

When Breath Becomes Air is an unfinished memoir published posthumously written by Paul Kalanithi, he is/was a chief neurosurgeon resident, he also had two master degrees in both literature and the history and philosophy of science. Paul at the age of 35 got diagnosed with stage four lung cancer at a moment when he was close to achieving his potential, and he had wrote the book in his deathbed. The book is an examination of Paul’s life, about what gave his life a meaning. To label the book as a cancer book would be unfair to Paul’s purpose, it is not as much about death as it is about the art of living a meaningful life, it is a profound insight on mortality, philosophy, and literature, it is a book about the classical debates on science vs literature and which one explains the human experience more deeply.Finishing high school, Paul was interested in literature and philosophy, as well as biology, therefor he decided to major both of them, for him these fields provided different perspectives on mortality, death, and meaning. His biggest dream back then was to be a writer since for him literature provided the best account of the life of the mind, and later on he becomes equally interested in neuroscience which studied the brain as an organism that ignites meaning, language, and interpretations of the world around us. He was driven by his quest for meaning, and he was eager to lead a life that would give him the chance to confront death, and suffering, he chose to find the answers which books didn’t provide about what makes human life meaningful even in the face of death and decay. During his residency as a neurosurgeon he was surrounded by decay and death indeed, each day he witnessed people die, and others live, he saw people losing their identities, their abilities to communicate, and most importantly people losing what gives their life a meaning. Paul became a chief resident, he became more responsible, more experienced, and more insightful, so he could feel the life he was aspiring becoming so reachable, but then he was diagnosed with stage four of lung cancer.With his diagnosis everything started feeling so uncertain, his dreams, his hopes, and his body were all shifting, and becoming distant with each day. Paul had to decide what gives his life a meaning, he chose to depend his future on how much he will live, he hope he’ll have enough time to preserve both the identity he grew into, and the identities of his future patients, and he had another plan to become a writer and a father if he had less than two years to live.One of the few lessons to learn from this book, and apply on our lives for a meaningful future is would be keeping on doing the same mundane activities if we knew we would die within the next four or three months. Grab a paper, and write a list of things you would do, for me I would defiantly tell my brother how much I hate him, or write a book, maybe I would tell someone I love how much I love them, or spend more time with those close to me, and be grateful to have them in my life. The lesson we learn from this book is in order to live, we have to embrace the fact of our mortality, to understand what makes our lives meaningful, what is the hidden force that keep us on striving tirelessly.Another thing I loved about the book is how independent and smooth Paul wrote the events. Paul would have been a great writer if his life had taken a literary turn instead of science. His book is beautifully written, timeless, philosophical, and heartbreaking. The fact that we read a dead person’s memoir is sad, adding up to that the metaphors Paul put into the book, and the poetic glimpses, as well as the deeply spiritual insight the book becomes angst, and gloomy.The choice of this book came to me when I thought of how a lot of us can’t get over a breakup, or the death of someone either we know, or fictional characters. When The Fault In Our Stars, by John Green came out, the vast majority of readers felt deep attachment to Augustus and Hazel, and everybody felt heartbroken after ending the book, the characters always stay with us, deep down within all of us, they reminded us of people we lost for cancer or other terminal diseases, or in sudden car accidents, we still mourn for them, When Breath Becomes Air helps us both examine our own lives, and make our approach to mortality more graceful. It is a therapeutic book for the simple fact that it is a real discourse on a real people’s own private battle with cancer, and the existential weight.