Paul Kalanithi explores themes of life and death in When Breath Becomes Air by linking death to birth. In doing so, he evokes the cyclical nature of life and death and the idea of one's legacy being carried on through one's children.
When Breath Becomes Air is divided into two main sections. In the first, Dr. Kalanithi explores life and death from a medical doctor's perspective. In the second, he explores these same themes from the perspective of a patient diagnosed with terminal cancer. Both sections describe birth and death as linked.
Although Dr. Kalanithi's medical specialty was neurosurgery, the first section of the book contains an extensive description of his obstetrics rotation during his medical training, linking birth to the book's overarching exploration of death. He describes the first birth he attended, a cesarian section of premature twins, as also being the first time he experienced death as a medical professional (both babies died). This experience links the natural processes that begin and end life. Dr. Kalanithi goes on to describe the birth of a healthy baby, as well as the deaths of several patients and friends at various stages of life. By introducing the concept of death through a birth, Dr. Kalanithi sets the stage to explore life's meaning through the idea that death is always looming.
A major plot point in the next section of the book is Dr. Kalanithi and his wife's decision to have a child in the face of Dr. Kalanithi's terminal diagnosis. Due to his cancer treatment, they must conceive using in vitro fertilization. They create several embryos, implanting only the healthiest. The other embryos are allowed to die, linking Dr. Kalanithi's daughter's life to death from the outset. The last paragraph of this section describes the joy and meaning his daughter's birth, only eight months before his death, gave him. He implores her, when taking stock of her own life, not to discount what her very existence meant to him. By having a child, Dr. Kalanithi was able to extend his life's meaning beyond his own death.
By describing death and birth as closely linked, Dr. Kalanithi explores themes of life and death from the perspective of the natural life cycle, touching on both its arbitrary nature and the potential for meaning therein.
Paul Kalanithi explores the themes of life and death from the perspective of a medical professional in his book When Breath Becomes Air, a book he wrote after learning he had been diagnosed with a terminal illness.
The timing of his writing as well as his career choice lend a poignancy to the themes at hand; Kalanithi began writing about his life only after learning it would end earlier than expected, and he reflects on his life after putting much of his life on hold to pursue rigorous medical training as a neurosurgeon. Just as his training is nearing completion, instead of returning to a life lived mostly beyond the hospital doors, he finds out that his life is likely coming to an end thanks to an insidious cancer diagnosis.
Kalanithi's medical training and his experiences as a child of a cardiologist enable him to consider life differently than others who are not members of the medical field. He sifts through his own memories of childhood and his educational years as most memoirists would, but his keen awareness of his own body's processes give his explorations of life and death a philosophical distance that doesn't feel sentimental or overly emotional. Rather, the discussions of life and death present the reality of Kalanithi's last days eloquently, which leads the reader to wonder what other wise reflections he might have written had he been able to live longer.
Life and death are the central themes of the memoir When Breath Becomes Air, which Paul Kalanithi wrote while he was dying of Stage IV metastatic lung cancer. Kalanithi was already familiar with death from his training as a neurosurgeon—he was in the midst of his residency when, at the age of thirty-six, he received his diagnosis and realized he would not survive. In medical school he had studied cadavers, and while working with an ob-gyn he had witnessed the deaths of infants born prematurely. His career as a doctor was based around staving off death and disease while extending and improving the lives of his patients, but now death had become undeniably personal. Writing his memoir was a way for Kalanithi to confront his mortality and to pose questions about the meaning of life and the mystery of death, such as “If the unexamined life was not worth living, was the unlived life worth examining?” He refers to the “twinned mysteries of death, its experiential and biological manifestations,” which include both the physical symptoms of disease and the existential perplexities of facing the end of one’s own life. When they found out Kalanithi might not have long to live, he and his wife, Lucy, decided to try to have a child so that Kalanithi’s legacy could live on. Their daughter, Cady, was born around the same time Kalanithi learned he had about five years left and began writing When Breath Becomes Air. For Kalanithi, Cady represented life and its continuation even as his own life came to an end.
No comments:
Post a Comment