When Breath Becomes Air

by Paul Kalanithi

This book carries the urgency of racing against time, of having important things to say.

“It’s just tragic enough and just imaginable enough. [The reader] can get into these shoes, walk a bit, and say, ‘So that’s what it looks like from here … sooner or later I’ll be back here in my own shoes.’

We each joked to close friends that the secret to saving a relationship is for one person to become terminally ill.

We were as inseparable as we had been as medical students, when we would hold hands during lectures.

Despite stunning grief over their son’s illness, his parents remained an unwavering source of comfort and security. Renting an apartment nearby, they visited often, Paul’s father rubbing his feet, his mother making him Indian dosa with coconut chutney.

He cried while looking at a drawing we kept on the bathroom mirror that said, “I want to spend all the rest of my days here with you.”

Indeed, the version of Paul I miss most, more even than the robust, dazzling version with whom I first fell in love, is the beautiful, focused man he was in his last year, the Paul who wrote this book—frail but never weak.

he once said that he found poetry more comforting than Scripture—

I visit his grave often, taking a small bottle of Madeira, the wine of our honeymoon destination. Each time, I pour some out on the grass for Paul. When Paul’s parents and brothers are with me, we talk as I rub the grass as if it were Paul’s hair.

The evening before Paul’s memorial service, our siblings and I gathered with twenty of Paul’s oldest, closest friends,

He was, and would have continued to be, a good person and a deep thinker.