When Breath Becomes Air

by Paul Kalanithi

Literature not only illuminated another’s experience, it provided, I believed, the richest material for moral reflection.

I studied literature and philosophy to understand what makes life meaningful,

The professor was a mentor, someone who thought deeply about how science and morality intersected.

brains give rise to our ability to form relationships and make life meaningful. Sometimes, they break.

to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.

found myself increasingly often arguing that direct experience of life-and-death questions was essential to generating substantial moral opinions about them.

What makes life meaningful enough to go on living?

had started in this career, in part, to pursue death: to grasp it, uncloak it, and see it eye-to-eye, unblinking.

As a resident, my highest ideal was not saving lives—everyone dies eventually—but guiding a patient or family to an understanding of death or illness.

Had I been more religious in my youth, I might have become a pastor, for it was the pastoral role I’d sought.

what makes his life worth living, and what devastation makes it reasonable to let that life end.

“do you think my life has meaning? Did I make the right choices?”

understand what made my life worth living—and

After so many years of living with death, I’d come to understand that the easiest death wasn’t necessarily the best. We talked it over. Our families gave their blessing. We decided to have a child. We would carry on living, instead of dying.

it was literature that brought me back to life during this time.

main message of Jesus, I believed, is that mercy trumps justice every time.

There is perhaps only one thing to say to this infant, who is all future, overlapping briefly with me, whose life, barring the improbable, is all but past. That message is simple: When you come to one of the many moments in life where you must give an account of yourself, provide a ledger of what you have been, and done, and meant to the world, do not, I pray, discount that you filled a dying man’s days with a sated joy, a joy unknown to me in all my prior years, a joy that does not hunger for more and more but rests, satisfied. In this time, right now, that is an enormous thing.

Writing this book was a chance for this courageous seer to be a sayer, to teach us to face death with integrity.

one trick to managing a terminal illness is to be deeply in love—to be vulnerable, kind, generous, grateful.