EPEOLATRY : When Breath Becomes Air

I've just finished this lovely book today. It is a masterpiece. It deserves to be a best-seller.

I started reading this as I heard that this was the self written story of a top neurosurgoen’s struggle against lung cancer. But as I started reading, I began to realise that this book is a literary gem of the highest quality dealing with meaning of life, philosophy, stark reality of death and how to follow your calling or passion when you know that your death is near. 

Paul is a top neurosurgeon. He discovers he has cancer at the height of his career. Death is imminent. Life is important.

The book and the style of writing is deeply moving. Navigating between those exquisite thoughts of the quandary between life and death the author finds a fine line of meaningful dialogue within himself.

“Science may provide the most useful way to organize empirical, reproducible data, but its power to do so is predicated on its inability to grasp the most central aspects of human life: hope, fear, love, hate, beauty, envy, honor, weakness, striving, suffering, virtue.”

Death is a certainty in everybody’s life: but nobody knows when it is going to strike us. We all still live our lives with full vigour, follow our passions, give birth to children even though death is a certainty.

Death is a very certain and near possibility for the protagonist in the book, as he suffers from terminal lung cancer. During the short time he has in this world to live, he follows his passion of neurosurgery, have a child from his wife and finishes the manuscript of this book. This book is about living life till one dies.

Some lines from this book which touched my heart :

"That message is simple: When you come to one of the many moments in life when you must give an account of yourself, provide a ledger of what you have been, and done, and meant to the world, do not, I pray, discount that you filled a dying man’s days with a sated joy, a joy unknown to me in all my prior years, a joy that does not hunger for more and more, but rests, satisfied. In this time, right now, that is an enormous thing."

"Will having a newborn distract from the time we have together?" she asked. "Don't you think saying goodbye to your child will make your death more painful?"

"Wouldn't it be great if it did?" I said. Lucy and I both felt that life wasn't about avoiding suffering."

(At this moment tears running down my face 😢)

"I would have to learn to live in a different way, seeing death as an imposing itinerant visitor but knowing that even if I'm dying, until I actually die, I am still living."

It has many quotes that describe the meaning of life, limitations of science, relevance of religion. Sorry I can't add all it here.

 I can’t go on. I’ll go on.

Paul Kalanithi, When Breath Becomes Air

🙏🏻