On January 24, 2014, Paul Kalanithi wrote an op-ed called ‘How Long Have I Got Left?’ in The New York Times . Within hours, it went viral. The slice-of-life story touched a fervent chord with millions as it was a young man’s heartbreaking, existential monologue. Kalanithi was 36 years old, and in just a year he would be dead. He was diagnosed with Stage IV metastatic lung cancer. And being an exceptionally brainy neurosurgeon, he knew that his time was up.

The essay was a beauty in prose, uniquely disturbing for its openness and rattling plainspeak, and formed the kernel of his memoir, When Breath Becomes Air . Soon, Kalanithi would write another piece, for Stanford Medicine, this time titled ‘Before I Go’. Cancer — which fills the role of an illness “experienced as a ruthless, secret invasion”, as Susan Sontag put it in Illness as Metaphor — is a philosopher among diseases. So was TB decades ago.

In a way, cancer gets the best of the humans. It makes them painfully re-negotiate everything that life has been, bringing out a catharsis at the end.

Often, upon knowing about the captivity of the illness, humans— according to Christopher Hitchens, who lost his battle against lung cancer in December 2011 — progress from “denial to rage through bargaining to depression and the eventual bliss of acceptance”.

But Kalanithi was different. Of course he did go through all these stages, but he did it all backward. He knew he would die soon, and was not ready to waste time anchoring on anarchic hope. To him, writing was the most efficient therapy in his helplessly vain battle against cancer, before he succumbed to “finitude”. “Words have a longevity I do not,” he wrote. Kalanithi was a gifted writer thanks to his passion for literature, ignited by his South Indian mother, and the way he blended science and writing came handy during these defining moments. His clarity of thought is endearing, and the depth of his philosophy of life gallantly profound.

Kalanithi was born in New York in 1977. He graduated in 2000 with a Master’s degree in English literature and a Bachelor’s in human biology. His father is a Christian, his mother a Hindu. Their marriage was condemned on both sides, and had led to years of familial rifts so wide that Kalanithi’s maternal grandmother always called him by his Hindu-sounding middle name, Sudhir. And such experiences helped him look at the world and the relations that fill it more realistically. As a kid, Kalanithi developed a strong enchantment with romantic poetry, which would later help shape his outlook in myriad ways, illuminating his young ideas with exquisite imagery. Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World shaped his nascent moral philosophy and became the subject of his college admissions essay, in which he argued that happiness was not the point of life.

Then what is? Kalanithi believed living was all about making meaning. Science helped him understand the meaning, while literature helped him experience it. What makes human life meaningful, he asks. Literature provided the best account of the life of the mind, while neuroscience laid down the most elegant rules of the brain. And in his search for meaning, he took assistance from the best minds of the times, from TS Eliot to Vladimir Nabokov and Jeremy Levin.

Kalanithi saw language as an almost supernatural force existing between people. So he wrote with purpose and passion, and motivated by a ticking clock, as his wife Lucy writes in the epilogue. Of course, the young doctor could not finish all he wanted to jot down.

Being a neurosurgeon, mortality, or death for that matter, was no alien project for him. “After so many years of living with death, I’d come to understand that the easiest death wasn’t necessarily the best,” he wrote. So he decided to use the best arsenal in his battle against mortality — he fathered a child. In a way, he extended his existence while giving himself up.

In this book, cancer does not come across as a demonic pregnancy, as Sontag saw it, but as a work of art with a heavy difference, a diminishing yet crucial platform where one can have some serious, naked engagements with oneself and the world. Indeed, the book is decorated with references to myriad forms of death. Yet, it won’t disturb you the way some newspaper reports do. It is more like a serene cemetery with an inviting, breezy tranquillity, than a morgue where you smell of cold death and feel the wetness of wasted blood. In a world of “asynchronous communication” (as Abraham Verghese, another doctor-writer, observes in his foreword), Kalanithi’s work comes as a timely reminder of the power of thought and text in spreading a deeper understanding of human life.

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