A book that will stay with me
A new client came to me this month with lung cancer. I wanted to understand her world a little better before our first session. That’s how I found myself reading When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi.
Kalanithi was a neurosurgeon in his mid-thirties – on the cusp of completing his training, with a brilliant career ahead of him – when he was diagnosed with stage IV lung cancer. The book is what he wrote in the time he had left. Part memoir, part meditation on what makes a life meaningful when you know it’s ending.
I found it uplifting and solemn in equal measure, sometimes within the same paragraph. He writes about medicine, mortality, identity and love with a precision that only someone who has lived on both sides of a diagnosis could manage. There’s no self-pity. No false hope. Just an extraordinarily clear-eyed account of what it means to be human when time becomes finite.
What struck me most was how little he asked for sympathy, and how much he asked of himself – to keep showing up, to keep finding meaning, right until the end. As someone who works with people navigating life after cancer, I found that quietly profound.
This isn’t an easy read. But it’s a deeply human one.
