When Breath Becomes Air

by Paul Kalanithi

You could not help but feel your specklike existence against the immensity of the mountain, the earth, the universe, and yet still feel your own two feet on the talus, reaffirming your presence amid the grandeur.

I feared I was on the way to becoming Tolstoy’s stereotype of a doctor, preoccupied with empty formalism, focused on the rote treatment of disease—and utterly missing the larger human significance.

When there’s no place for the scalpel, words are the surgeon’s only tool.

A tureen of tragedy was best allotted by the spoonful.

You can’t ever reach perfection, but you can believe in an asymptote toward which you are ceaselessly striving.

Cease Not till Death

Because 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.

the physician’s duty is not to stave off death or return patients to their old lives, but to take into our arms a patient and family whose lives have disintegrated and work until they can stand back up and face, and make sense of, their own existence.

face death with integrity.

“I will share your joy and sorrow / Till we’ve seen this journey through.”

At home in bed a few weeks before he died, I asked him, “Can you breathe okay with my head on your chest like this?” His answer was “It’s the only way I know how to breathe.”

frail but never weak.

“We shall rise insensibly, and reach the tops of the everlasting hills, where the winds are cool and the sight is glorious.”