Before I start writing this book review, I need a minute.

(a deep inhale and a sharp exhale accompanied by an audible sigh later)

I’ll now begin with reviewing the book. I needed a moment to have the words to do justice to this masterpiece of a book that Dr. Paul Kalanithi left us with, “When Breath becomes Air”- Dr. Paul Kalanithi.

I started this book two weeks before my birthday and finished it two days before it. This book is a memoir of Dr. Paul Kalanithi and, it has so much to offer about the meaning of life, a life well lived. I think I couldn’t have picked a better pre-birthday read because as I turn 23 this book has left me with something that I can only try to put to words, hoping I will do justice to it.

Paul Kalanithi, a literature student, wants to understand life, death, and the meaning of everything in between. In his quest to live a meaningful life and understand death, he becomes a doctor, a neurosurgeon. Eventually, he navigates through his death as he gets diagnosed with life-threatening cancer right before he graduates from medical school.

Funnily enough, he mentions at one point in the book – “–Isn’t a life-threatening terminal disease a perfect gift for a young man who wants to understand death– what better way to understand than to experience it.”

The book is not complete, but it’s everything Dr. Paul Kalanithi could manage in his limited time left as his cancer advanced. Through this memoir, you’ll get to know Dr. Paul Kalanithi. You’ll walk with him in his journey from being a schoolboy to graduating in literature from Stanford and eventually becoming a Neurosurgeon, page by page.

It’ll be like being in Grey’s Anatomy, but it’ll be all too real because it’ll be the life of an actual doctor, Dr. Paul Kalanithi. He’ll tell you about some of his patients. I was full of appreciation for his honesty, his compassion, and sincerity towards his patients. The sense of accountability and responsibility that comes with being a doctor, the profession that gives them the ability to save lives, comes with overwhelming guilt of failure at saving the life they set out to save. There’s a heartbreaking moment in that particular context. I certainly, after reading this book respect, every person in the medical profession a whole lot more. This book is the closest I can get to understanding what it’s like being in their shoes.

As you progress in the book, you realize doctors are just as human as we are.

When Dr. Paul Kalanithi is diagnosed with cancer, there’s a line that reads – “as a doctor, I’m used to authority, but in the patient’s gown I felt so meek.” A man treating terminal diseases and performing complicated surgeries for nearly a decade finds himself changed when his scrubs get replaced by a patient gown. He feels vulnerable when faced with his mortality.
With his time suddenly cut short. He finds himself struggling to find meaning in life again. His identity forged with years of hard work and dedication that of Dr. Paul Kalanithi, a resident neurosurgeon, is suddenly changed to Dr. Paul Kalanithi, with a stage IV lung cancer.
Eighteen months away from graduating, not sure if he’ll make it, the life he had planned for himself falling apart. “When Breath becomes Air” is the story of a dying man trying to understand if death is inevitable, then what kind of life does he want to live and as who? as Dr. Paul Kalanithi, a neurosurgeon or as Paul a husband to Lucy, as a Father to his daughter?
Does he want to spend his remaining time performing surgeries, looking after patients? Or does he want to do something less demanding? Should he write a book? How much time does he have anyway? So deciding his identity becomes easier.

This book is everything that Dr. Paul Kalanithi had to say to the world. It takes you through his life and death.
You’ll get introduced to him, get to know him, admire him, laugh with him, cry with and for him, you’ll mourn him as if he were an old friend you knew all along.

I read this book six years after Dr. Paul’s passing in 2015, and through this book, I got to know him, and by the end of it, I mourned his loss. When he says he hopes he lives long enough for his daughter to have a memory of him, my heart broke into a million pieces.

His message to his daughter is something you can’t read past without welling up.

Death is inevitable, but what you do up until it arrives is what gives meaning to your life. If there’s a book that you read and experience what that phrase means when put into practice, it is – “When Breath becomes Air.”

I hope you give yourself a chance to get to know Dr. Paul Kalanithi and his story because he’ll leave you with something precious.

© Samridhi Dutta

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