“I began to realize that coming in such close contact with my own mortality had changed both nothing and everything. Before my cancer was diagnosed, I knew that someday I would die, but I didn’t know when. After the diagnosis, I knew that someday I would die, but I didn’t know when. But now I knew it acutely. The problem wasn’t really a scientific one. The fact of death is unsettling. Yet there is no other way to live.”
It’s heart rending, It’s poignant. It brought tears to my eyes as the story progressed and reached its end. It’s a memoir of Paul Kalanithi who was a neurosurgeon and writer. He was ambitious, he was progressive. He graduated from Stanford University and when he was at the peak of his career he was diagnosed with stage lV lung cancer. In an instant his life changes and the future that he had dreamed for him and his family shattered. How he lives his life in the face of death with the basic question of making it meaningful, how he confronts his sufferings, his challenges in the times of adversity is inspiring and worth reading. He died on March 9, 2015. The book was published posthumously and its epilogue written by his wife Lucy Goddard Kalanithi.
