JUN - When Breath Becomes Air

June review for Book Riot's Read Harder 2018: When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi, 2016. [book published posthumously category]

I knew that this was going to be a hard book to read. When Breath Becomes Air, by Paul Kalanithi, is the memoir of a 36-year-old neurosurgeon who is diagnosed with lung cancer before the end of his residency. It was published posthumously (hence its ability to be counted for this category), but that wasn't necessarily what was going to make it hard. Earlier this year, my father was diagnosed with Stage IV Esophageal Cancer. His prognosis is decidedly better than Kalanithi's, and he has finished his first eight-week round of chemo with little to no worsening of his condition. But still. The way that cancer works is that when it infects your life, it becomes a capital letter. Cancer. You can't think about it the same way anymore. It is not remote, like the tragic but heartwarming story of someone that Lifetime made a movie about. It isn't a cautionary tale about someone forty years ago who got it from cigarettes. My father is the single healthiest sixty-year-old man that I know, and he still has cancer. He did everything (mostly) right. He hasn't smoked in over thirty years. He exercises every day, sometimes multiple times. Sure, his hydration could be better, and he could always do more yoga, but still. Cancer wasn't something that happened to someone like him. And yet.

Paul Kalanithi was almost done with his neurosurgery training when he was diagnosed with cancer. He details the beginning of his career, how from the outset he was fascinated not only with biology and life, but also with what made life worth living and definable, things he could only really parse through by immersing himself in literature. It was hard to read this book, but it was also beautiful, the way he talked about language and life and death. There is a passage Kalanithi writes where he talks about the brain and the mind and his resonance with T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land that absolutely floored me: "Literature not only illuminated another's experience, it provided, I believed, the richest material for moral reflection. My brief forays into the formal ethics of analytic philosophy felt dry as a bone, missing the messiness and weight of real human life" (p31).

Reading Kalanithi talk about his own illness and his process of divorcing his doctor side from his patient side was illuminating. My father is an engineer, not a doctor, but he has a similar predilection for control and information that he is learning how to balance. That we are all learning how to balance. Thinking about cancer with a capital C and reading about someone who wanted to not only stave off death in his patients but also understand it has helped me in ways that I was not fully expecting. I know that this story is not my dad's story. He is treatable and positive and a fighter (even though cancer doesn't really care how much you're willing to fight, it's just biology).  My dad is healthy, except that he has cancer. My dad is strong. He still teaches spin class (pictured left) even when he has his post-treatment treatment fanny pack, and he still laughs at my jokes and sends me pictures of squirrels. He is doing great and I am so goddamn proud to be here to witness it. I love you, Dad.