When Breath Becomes Air

Having completed my Christmas books I was drawn to “When Breath Becomes Air” and I’m glad I was.
Recommending books to others isn’t something I find easy to do, we have different tastes, different experiences and these ebb and flow with our lives. But with one caveat I’d say this is a book that you would do well to read - pick your time.
 
So the author neurosurgeon Paul Kalanithi starts his own story looking at his own CT scan which reveals the cancer that he knows will shorten his life just when he felt it was ready to begin.
The book then falls into two parts, his life up until that point and then the 18months form that point to his death.
He writes so well as he searches with urgency for something he’d always searched for in literature and life and faith and his training and work as a doctor, the search for meaning.
As a doctor myself I found him putting into words what I have always known, I loved his decision to make his paper work - patients, I know exactly what he meant by that and made a decision one day myself some time ago that whenever I was looking at lab results or hospital letters, or filling in those piles of paperwork I would visualise the person and often the family whose story this was part of. I’ve needed over the years to bring myself back to that for sure. There was much else in the book that resonated with my experience professionally and held up a mirror to my vocational self.
 
“Human knowledge is never contained in one person. It grows from the relationships we create between each other and the world, and still it is never complete.”
 
More than that and where the book has a much wider appeal is how he reflects on our living as well as our dying – the one thing we know about our future with certainty is that we’ll die.
 
Not since I read Marilynne Robinsons Gilead have I finished a book carrying simultaneously the feeling of both deep joy and pain.
 
When Breath Becomes Air is not a book I’ll send to the Charity shop, it’s not one I’ll keep to myself. I will read it again and I’ll give it away many times.
 
"You that seek what life is in death,
Now find it air that once was breath "
Caelica by Baron Brooke Fulke Greville