When breath becomes air video1/11/2024 In fact, I can say this is the best nonfiction story I’ve read in a long time. “I was super touched by it, as was Melinda and our daughter Jennifer. The book was published 10 months after his death and has since gone on to become a New York Times bestseller. When Breath Becomes Air is Kalanithi’s memoir about his journey through medical school and eventual battle with stage IV lung cancer, which claimed his life in March 2015 when he was 37 years old. But this book definitely earned my admiration - and tears,” Gates wrote. “I’m usually not one for tear-jerkers about death and dying - I didn’t love The Last Lecture or Tuesdays with Morrie. Gates is a well-documented book lover, but he said that his latest read managed to make him legitimately cry. And her husband’s book received a glowing review in the newspaper.The Microsoft founder raved about Paul Kalanithi’s posthumous When Breath Becomes Airin a recent post on his personal blog. Lucy Godddard Kalanithi recently published in The New York Times an essay about her life after her husband’s death. Their deaths remind Kalanithi of a passage from Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot: “One day we were born, one day we shall die … Birth astride of a grave, the light gleams an instant, then it’s night once more.” In the parting gift that is this book, Kalanithi tenderly reminds his readers of our common fate. Their daughter, Cady, was eight months old when Paul Kalanithi died in March 2015.Įarly in the book, Kalanithi writes about the first time he assists a woman in childbirth. “It’s the only way I know how to breathe,” he replied. One night she asked her husband if he could breathe comfortably with her head on his chest. During the treatments that prolonged his life for a year, the two became as inseparable as they had been as medical students, when they’d held hands during lectures. In the epilogue, Lucy Goddard Kalanithi recounts her husband’s final months. Reading revives him, and he and Lucy decide to have a child. Instead, he feels as if “someone had just firebombed the path forward.” He has forsaken literature to practice medicine, but now his illness compels him to seek it out again. Terminal illness, he tells himself, should be “the perfect gift to that young man who had wanted to understand death.” But the hoped-for epiphany eludes him. In the memoir’s second half, Kalanithi describes his attempts to find meaning in his prognosis. He writes that “we were all silently apologizing to our cadavers, not because we sensed the transgression but because we did not.” Among those classmates, Kalanithi meets his wife-to-be, Lucy Goddard, M.D. Caring for patients, he decides, offers the best way of exploring “what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” In gross anatomy class at medical school, he and his fellow students learn to repress the thought that they are slicing open real people. His search leads him to medicine after all. He studies all three, first at Stanford, then at Cambridge. What interests Kalanithi is how to formulate a philosophy of life at the intersection of biology, philosophy, and literature. Growing up in Kingman, Ariz., he feels no inclination to emulate his cardiologist father, who leaves home at dawn and returns in the dark. “And with that,” he writes, “the future I had imagined, the one just about to be realized, the culmination of decades of striving, evaporated.” It is spring 2013, he is 36, and Stanford has been courting him for a faculty job.Īfter describing that terrible day, Kalanithi explains how he has reached that moment. He sees lungs “matted with innumerable tumors, the spine deformed, a full lobe of the liver obliterated. ’07, in his sixth year of a neurosurgery residency at Stanford, sits before a hospital computer looking at CT scans. In the opening paragraph, Paul Kalanithi, M.A., M.Phil., M.D. The catastrophe in When Breath Becomes Air reveals itself immediately.
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