When Breath Becomes Air, by Paul Kalanithi

At some time during the holiday season, I was in the chic suburbs of Paris, my hosts had gone to celebrate with friends, I was alone with my lover in front of the fireplace. And I was depressed.

It's the vacations that do it, I think. I was super comfortable, I had absolutely nothing on my schedule except wondering what I wanted to eat for dinner. What is my brain doing in this situation? Spinning like a hamster in a wheel. It's whispering to me that I'm worthless, that life has no meaning, that my lover could die at any time, that we're always alone in the end, etc.

Lovely, isn't it?

Hoping to restore my sanity a bit, I wanted to dive into a deep and sad biography that would reconnect me to what really matters. Why not a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, while we're at it?

Summary

Before he was diagnosed with cancer, Paul would probably have described himself as someone who knows a lot about death. As a neurosurgeon, he deals with it every day. He helps his patients make some of the most important decisions of their lives, and performs delicate surgeries in the midst of everything that makes them human and alive. He's also the one who delivers the bad news to their loved ones when operations go wrong.

Yet Dr. Kalanithi could never have predicted what he would face when he received his diagnosis. Who could? He is not yet forty, and his life was just beginning to really develop. He was beginning to build a reputation in his field, he has a wife, and he was thinking of having children soon. And to make matters worse, his doctor flatly refuses to talk about survival probabilities: maybe he has a year left, maybe ten. No one knows.

How does one make decisions under these circumstances? Should he still consider having a child with his wife? Can he still consider a career? Without his career and his health, who is he?

Impressions

You can probably imagine what a book like this can do to you. I knew it, it's not a punchline: Dr. Kalanithi dies at the end. But obviously, that didn't stop me from crying my eyes out. Especially when Paul's wife concludes the book he didn't have time to finish.

I found this book incredibly beautiful though. It reminded me how beautiful and hard life is at the same time. That love is really what matters. That as humans, we are incredibly resilient. And that no one can take their future for granted.

This book is by no means a guide to understanding death, or what to do when faced with it. These are eternal and incredibly personal questions to which we will probably never have a definitive answer. I have no idea what I would have done in Dr. Kalanithi's place, but I suspect it would not have been the same. I also suspect that I would not have been able to express it at all as well as he did.

This book is to be put in the hands of people who have hard times ahead (or masochists like me who want to think about death from time to time). It's going to be hard. But it will be okay.