When Breath Becomes Air

by Paul Kalanithi

I was driven less by achievement than by trying to understand, in earnest: What makes human life meaningful?

awareness of how our suffering can make us callous to the obvious suffering of another.

If the unexamined life was not worth living, was the unlived life worth examining?

So relevant to the situation that I'm in right now!! - 5/31/18

There is a moment, a cusp, when the sum of gathered experience is worn down by the details of living. We are never so wise as when we live in this moment.

And as I sat there, I realized that the questions intersecting life, death, and meaning, questions that all people face at some point, usually arise in a medical context.

I had to help those families understand that the person they knew—the full, vital independent human—now lived only in the past and that I needed their input to understand what sort of future he or she would want: an easy death or to be strung between bags of fluids going in, others coming out, to persist despite being unable to struggle.

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.

I didn't capture any notes beyond this point, mostly because it wasn't a section of grand wisdom or pithy quotes, only a man dying slowly and examining his life as it had now become. As depressing as this sounds, it was something I couldn't put down.