How to Overcome Anything, Even Death
I recently read the book “When Breath Becomes Air” after my friend Andy recommended it to me.
He’s not much of a sentimental guy, but he told me he bawled like a baby when he read it on a plane. It was so bad that the flight attendant had to ask him if he was okay.
It’s a memoir, written by Paul Kalanithi.
And it’s about death.
Paul had stage IV lung cancer. He got it at a peak moment in his life. At a time when he finally could see success.
Can you imagine that happening to you?
You see, Paul had already made it.
He went to Stanford University, got a Masters at Cambridge, became cum laude at Yale, and then won the Dr. Louis H. Nahum Prize.
He went through the 15-hour workdays of being a neurosurgeon and saving lives. He drained blood from patients’ skulls, removed cancer tumors from brains.
The hell of a man deserved the world.
His program director at Stanford sat him down one day and told him, “Paul, I think you’ll be the number one candidate for any job you apply for.”
But before he reached his goal of becoming a professor to advance his already recognized research, he died on March 9, 2015 at age 37.
Here’s something he says in the memoir that really messed me up.
The man who loved hiking, camping, and running, who expressed his love through gigantic hugs, who threw his giggling niece high in the air, that was a man I no longer was.
At best, I could aim to be him again.
Now this story is not a tragedy.
Yes it’s sad and there’s crying. A lot of it. But its takeaway is not that “life is unfair.” If we focused on the wrong parts to this story, we would be missing the entire point. And we would be doing him a disservice.
On Identity
Before we get to Paul’s message, I want to talk about the concept of identity.
It’s the question that we’ve been asked since we were kids. Who do want to be when you grow up?
And it’s something that is touched upon in the earlier parts of the book, especially during Paul’s residency when he worked with patients.
As the reader, you learn about alcoholics who bled to death, trauma cases from suicides and bar fights, babies born without brains. And of course, the cancer patients.
I was especially shocked to hear about one case where he saved someone only enough for his heart to beat. The patient would never be able to talk, and he would have to eat food through a tube for the rest of his life.
Going back to the concept of identity, learning about the life of a neurosurgeon gives me validation for my own life. I’m glad that I didn’t listen to my parents when they told me to get a medical degree.
I wouldn’t have been able to handle the pressure. Not even for a day. The responsibility of determining whether or not a person can live terrifies me.
But for Paul, this was his destiny. It was the path he was meant to take.
I don’t think I ever spent a minute of any day wondering why I did this work or whether it was worth it.
The call to protect life and not merely life but another’s identity, it is perhaps not too much to say another’s soul, was obvious in its sacredness.
Don’t you get goosebumps just reading that?
Being a neurosurgeon was Paul’s identity.
But tell me this.
What happens when you have to turn away from your calling? What happens when you can no longer be who you were meant to be? What becomes of your identity then?
After Paul got cancer, these were the questions that he faced.
Below is a quote from Lucy, Paul’s wife.
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.”
He cried on his last day in the operating room.
On Courage
Now like I said before.
This story is not a tragedy.
In the end, Paul fought on.
He had intense pains from simply standing up, but he fought on. He was back at it. He was treating patients and he was saving lives again.
It’s incredibly inspirational to see a man fighting for his identity. To see someone look at cancer dead in the face and to say, “fuck you, you’re not changing who I am.”
And although the cancer got worse and he had to stop treating patients in the end, his identity was not crushed.
It evolved.
This leads me to something else about Paul that is as inspiring as his resilience.
Courage.
Despite physical collapse he remained vigorous, open, full of hope not for an unlikely cure, but for days that were full of purpose and meaning.
I think we have a lot to learn from Paul.
Although the problems that we face in our daily lives may not be as extreme as death, we can learn from his courage.
Because Paul looked at death with a spirit of strength. By strength, I don’t mean power and might. I mean the opposite of it — strength in softness.
He accepted his fate.
He allowed himself to grieve, but he accepted it. And by doing that, he was able to move on to find a new purpose. That’s why I say that Paul’s identity evolved.
In the last of his days, Paul was able to find meaning in writing.
It was a race against time as he poured out his soul into words. It gave way to this memoir that I am talking about today. And even 3 years after his death, his story continues to inspire the world.
