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Paul Kalanithi - When Breath Becomes Air

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Paul Kalanithi When Breath Becomes Air

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#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER For readers of Atul Gawande, Andrew Solomon, and Anne Lamott, a profoundly moving, exquisitely observed memoir by a young neurosurgeon faced with a terminal cancer diagnosis who attempts to answer the question What makes a life worth living?
At the age of thirty-six, on the verge of completing a decades worth of training as a neurosurgeon, Paul Kalanithi was diagnosed with stage IV lung cancer. One day he was a doctor treating the dying, and the next he was a patient struggling to live. And just like that, the future he and his wife had imagined evaporated. When Breath Becomes Air chronicles Kalanithis transformation from a nave medical student possessed, as he wrote, by the question of what, given that all organisms die, makes a virtuous and meaningful life into a neurosurgeon at Stanford working in the brain, the most critical place for human identity, and finally into a patient and new father confronting his own mortality.
What makes life worth living in the face of death? What do you do when the future, no longer a ladder toward your goals in life, flattens out into a perpetual present? What does it mean to have a child, to nurture a new life as another fades away? These are some of the questions Kalanithi wrestles with in this profoundly moving, exquisitely observed memoir.
Paul Kalanithi died in March 2015, while working on this book, yet his words live on as a guide and a gift to us all. I began to realize that coming face to face with my own mortality, in a sense, had changed nothing and everything, he wrote. Seven words from Samuel Beckett began to repeat in my head: I cant go on. Ill go on. When Breath Becomes Air is an unforgettable, life-affirming reflection on the challenge of facing death and on the relationship between doctor and patient, from a brilliant writer who became both.
Praise for When Breath Becomes Air
I guarantee that finishing this book and then forgetting about it is simply not an option. . . . Part of this books tremendous impact comes from the obvious fact that its author was such a brilliant polymath. And part comes from the way he conveys what happened to himpassionately working and striving, deferring gratification, waiting to live, learning to dieso well. None of it is maudlin. Nothing is exaggerated. As he wrote to a friend: Its just tragic enough and just imaginable enough. And just important enough to be unmissable.Janet Maslin, The New York Times
An emotional investment well worth making: a moving and thoughtful memoir of family, medicine and literature. It is, despite its grim undertone, accidentally inspiring.The Washington Post
Possesses the gravity and wisdom of an ancient Greek tragedy . . . [Kalanithi] delivers his chronicle in austere, beautiful prose. The book brims with insightful reflections on mortality that are especially poignant coming from a trained physician familiar with what lies ahead.The Boston Globe
Devastating and spectacular . . . [Kalanithi] is so likeable, so relatable, and so humble, that you become immersed in his world and forget where its all heading.USA Today
Its [Kalanithis] unsentimental approach that makes When Breath Becomes Air so originaland so devastating. . . . Its only fault is that the book, like his life, ends much too early.Entertainment Weekly
[When Breath Becomes Air] split my head open with its beauty.Cheryl Strayed

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When Breath Becomes Air Paul KalanithiRandom House Publishing Group (2016)

Copyright 2016 by Corcovado Inc Foreword copyright 2016 by Abraham Verghese - photo 1

Copyright 2016 by Corcovado, Inc.

Foreword copyright 2016 by Abraham Verghese

All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by Random House, an imprint and division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

RANDOM HOUSE and the HOUSE colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Kalanithi, Paul, author.

Title: When breath becomes air / Paul Kalanithi ; foreword by Abraham Verghese.

Description: New York : Random House, 2016.

Identifiers: LCCN 2015023815 | ISBN 9780812988406 (hardback) | ISBN 9780812988413 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Kalanithi, PaulHealth. | LungsCancerPatientsUnited StatesBiography. | NeurosurgeonsBiography. | Husband and wife. | BISAC: BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Personal Memoirs. | MEDICAL / General. | SOCIAL SCIENCE / Death & Dying.

Classification: LCC RC280.L8 K35 2016 | DDC 616.99/424dc23 LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015023815

eBook ISBN9780812988413

randomhousebooks.com

Book design by Liz Cosgrove, adapted for eBook

Cover design: Rachel Ake

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Contents

E VENTS DESCRIBED ARE BASED on Dr. Kalanithis memory of real-world situations. However, the names of all patients discussed in this bookif given at allhave been changed. In addition, in each of the medical cases described, identifying detailssuch as patients ages, genders, ethnicities, professions, familial relationships, places of residence, medical histories, and/or diagnoseshave been changed. With one exception, the names of Dr. Kalanithis colleagues, friends, and treating physicians have also been changed. Any resemblance to persons living or dead resulting from changes to names or identifying details is entirely coincidental and unintentional.

You that seek what life is in death,Now find it air that once was breath.New names unknown, old names gone:Till time end bodies, but souls none.Reader! then make time, while you be,But steps to your eternity.Baron Brooke Fulke Greville, Caelica 83

FOREWORD

Abraham Verghese

I T OCCURS TO ME, as I write this, that the foreword to this book might be better thought of as an afterword. Because when it comes to Paul Kalanithi, all sense of time is turned on its head. To begin withor, maybe, to end withI got to know Paul only after his death. (Bear with me.) I came to know him most intimately when hed ceased to be.

I met him one memorable afternoon at Stanford in early February 2014. Hed just published an op-ed titled How Long Have I Got Left? in The New York Times, an essay that would elicit an overwhelming response, an outpouring from readers. In the ensuing days, it spread exponentially. (Im an infectious diseases specialist, so please forgive me for not using the word viral as a metaphor.) In the aftermath of that, hed asked to come see me, to chat, to get advice about literary agents, editors, the publishing processhe had a desire to write a book, this book, the one you are now holding in your hands. I recall the sun filtering through the magnolia tree outside my office and lighting this scene: Paul seated before me, his beautiful hands exceedingly still, his prophets beard full, those dark eyes taking the measure of me. In my memory, the picture has a Vermeer-like quality, a camera obscura sharpness. I remember thinking, You must remember this, because what was falling on my retina was precious. And because, in the context of Pauls diagnosis, I became aware of not just his mortality but my own.

We talked about a lot of things that afternoon. He was a neurosurgical chief resident. We had probably crossed paths at some point, but we hadnt shared a patient that we could recall. He told me he had been an English and biology major as an undergraduate at Stanford, and then stayed on for a masters in English literature. We talked about his lifelong love of writing and reading. I was struck by how easily he could have been an English professorand, indeed, he had seemed to be headed down that path at one point in his life. But then, just like his namesake on the road to Damascus, he felt the calling. He became a physician instead, but one who always dreamed of coming back to literature in some form. A book, perhaps. One day. He thought he had time, and why not? And yet now time was the very thing he had so little of.

I remember his wry, gentle smile, a hint of mischief there, even though his face was gaunt and haggard. Hed been through the wringer with this cancer but a new biological therapy had produced a good response, allowing him to look ahead a bit. He said during medical school hed assumed that he would become a psychiatrist, only to fall in love with neurosurgery. It was much more than a falling in love with the intricacies of the brain, much more than the satisfaction of training his hands to accomplish amazing featsit was a love and empathy for those who suffered, for what they endured and what he might bring to bear. I dont think he told me this as much as I had heard about this quality of his from students of mine who were his acolytes: his fierce belief in the moral dimension of his job. And then we talked about his dying.

After that meeting, we kept in touch by email, but never saw each other again. It was not just that I disappeared into my own world of deadlines and responsibilities but also my strong sense that the burden was on me to be respectful of his time. It was up to Paul if he wanted to see me. I felt that the last thing he needed was the obligation to service a new friendship. I thought about him a lot, though, and about his wife. I wanted to ask him if he was writing. Was he finding the time? For years, as a busy physician, Id struggled to find the time to write. I wanted to tell him that a famous writer, commiserating about this eternal problem, once said to me, If I were a neurosurgeon and I announced that I had to leave my guests to go in for an emergency craniotomy, no one would say a word. But if I said I needed to leave the guests in the living room to go upstairs to write I wondered if Paul would have found this funny. After all, he could actually say he was going to do a craniotomy! It was plausible! And then he could go write instead.

While Paul was writing this book, he published a short, remarkable essay in Stanford Medicine, in an issue that was devoted to the idea of time. I had an essay in the same issue, my piece juxtaposed to his, though I learned of his contribution only when the magazine was in my hands. In reading his words, I had a second, deeper glimpse of something of which there had been a hint in the New York Times essay: Pauls writing was simply stunning. He could have been writing about anything, and it would have been just as powerful. But he wasnt writing about anythinghe was writing about time and what it meant to him now, in the context of his illness. Which made it all so incredibly poignant.

But heres the thing I must come back to : the prose was unforgettable. Out of his pen he was spinning gold.

I reread Paul's piece again and again, trying to understand what he had brought about. First, it was musical. It had echoes of Galway Kinnell, almost a prose poem. (If one day it happens / you find yourself with someone you love / in a caf at one end /of the Pont Mirabeau, at the zinc bar / where wine stands in upward opening glasses to quote a Kinnell line, from a poem I once heard him recite in a bookstore in Iowa City, never looking down at the paper.) But it also had a taste of something else, something from an antique land, from a time before zinc bars. It finally came to me a few days later when I picked up his essay yet again: Pauls writing was reminiscent of Thomas Brownes. Browne had written Religio Medici in the prose of 1642, with all its archaic spellings and speech. As a young physician, I was obsessed with that book, kept at it like a farmer trying to drain a bog that his father before him had failed to drain. It was a futile task, and yet I was desperate to learn its secrets, tossing it aside in frustration, then picking it up again, unsure that it had anything for me but, in sounding the words, sensing that it did. I felt that I lacked some critical receptor for the letters to sing, to impart their meaning. It remained opaque, no matter how hard I tried.

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