You filled a dying man’s days with a sated joy. . .

“When Breath Becomes Air” was written by Paul Kalanithi, a man that had just completed his residency in neurological surgery and a postdoctoral fellowship in neuroscience. He had a MPhil in History and Philosophy of Science and Medicine from Cambridge and graduated from the Yale School of Medicine. He also received the American Academy of Neurological Surgery’s highest aware for research. At the age of 36, on the verge of completing a decade’s worth of training in medicine, he was diagnosed with stage IV lung cancer. During the last 22 months of his life he wrote this book. The following quotes are from this beautiful, inspiring and informative book – a story written by a dying father to an infant daughter.

“A few months ago, I celebrated my fifteenth college reunion at Stanford and stood out on the quad, drinking a whiskey as a pink sun dipped below the horizon; when old friends called out parting promises – “We’ll see you at the twenty-fifth!”— it seemed rude to respond with “Well… probably not.”

Everyone succumbs to finitude. I suspect I am not the only one who reaches this pluperfect state. Most ambitions are either achieved or abandoned; either way, they belong to the past. The future, instead of the ladder toward the goals of life, flattens out into a perpetual present. Money, status, all the vanities the preacher of Ecclesiastes described hold so little interest: a chasing after wind, indeed.

Yet one thing cannot be robbed of her futurity: our daughter, Cady. I hope I’ll live long enough that she has some memory of me. Words have a longevity I do not. I had thought I could leave her a series of letters — but what would they say? I don’t know what this girl will be like when she is fifteen; I don’t even know if she’ll take to the nickname we’ve given her. 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.’”

(When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi © 2016 by Corcovado, Inc., Random House, New York, NY)

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