I stretched out in the sun, relaxing on a desert plateau just above our house. I KNEW WITH CERTAINTY that I would never be a doctor. When Breath Becomes Air Introduction Excerpt. “Seven words from Samuel Beckett began to repeat in my head: ‘I can’t go on. “I began to realize that coming face to face with my own mortality, in a sense, had changed nothing and everything,” he wrote.
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. 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. When Breath Becomes Air chronicles Kalanithi’s transformation from a naïve 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.
And just like that, the future he and his wife had imagined evaporated. One day he was a doctor treating the dying, and the next he was a patient struggling to live. 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 bothĪt the age of thirty-six, on the verge of completing a decade’s worth of training as a neurosurgeon, Paul Kalanithi was diagnosed with stage IV lung cancer.
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