Book Review - When breath becomes air

I stumbled upon this book when I was searching for something else, and I was kind of intrigued by its title. This is an autobiographical memoir of a neurosurgeon of Indian origin Paul Kalanithi in Stanford who was diagnosed with lung cancer at the close of his residency. Paul died before the completion of this book and the epilogue was written by his wife Lucy. Though the theme is a memoir of a person who was suffering from terminal illness and how the disease changed his life; but there are deep questions to cogitate. It leaves the readers with questions to think upon, to ponder on the meaning of life. It is not that there will be a sense of revelation on reading this book, but I believe there will be few questions lingering on after reading this book.

Death is the certainty of life. What makes this certainty mysterious is that one does not know when it will happen. That is why, when Paul was diagnosed with cancer, he was not sure of how much time he had. His predicament was whether to go for his long pursued career of being a neuroscientist or to pursue writing that was his interest.  As he said in one of the lines, coming face to face with mortality changed nothing and everything in my life (paraphrased). It is interesting to read how Paul in his search for the question about what makes a life meaningful took to literature and when he did not get his answers there turned to the field of medicine and neurosurgery in particular. In the last part of the book, the last few months of his life and his final words to his new born daughter to whom the book is dedicated is saddening.

The book is in two parts. The first half is his journey to the residency that was where he wanted to reach in his professional career. The second half is about his remaining life after being diagnosed with lung cancer. Death as a subject is dealt differently in Hindu philosophy and the western philosophy, but the question that is common to all is; what makes the life meaningful, is the life means or is it an end in itself? Everyone has to search for the answers to these questions on their own, but the quest for answers begins with thinking about questions itself.