On a meaningful life

I finished reading When Breath Turns into Air by Paul Kalanithi. This was a hard book to read. Not because it was difficult. But because the baggage that others had put on it was so heavy. I had a preconception of how to feel upon reading this before even having started. It was to be sad. It was to be gut-wrenching.

It wasn't. At least not Kalanithi's words. His words and actions were so full of life. He suffered, there is no question about it. But he thrived nonetheless.

I would have to learn to live in a different way, seeing death as an imposing itinerant visitor but knowing that even if I’m dying, until I actually die, I am still living.

This quote really signaled the theme of the book for me. Much like my own experience with chronic illness, this was a lesson hard earned. It is acknowledging that while everything has changed, nothing has changed.

Kalanithi speaks of this often in the book. And it is a triumph that he does so. Acknowledging that everything changed after learning about chronic illness was the hardest thing I have done. But coming to terms with the knowledge that nothing had changed -yet- was even harder.

The former helps you come to term with reality, the latter helps you continue living.

When first diagnosed, there's a feeling that one day you'll win against the illness. You'll wake up and your kidneys will function again, and your ears and eyes won't be damaged. You'll wake up before this illness broke a chasm in your life's story. It is a bittersweet moment when you accept that it will not. Your illness is a fact. Your difficulties, also. It hurts to accept this.

But at the same breath, although you don't realize it then, it is freeing. No longer tethered to the false expectation of the past, you're able to deal with the realities that are around you. It is as if you're letting a new chapter start.

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.

Death is unsettling. Being ill means that the shadow of death looms over you - every day. It becomes hard to see a future in 5 years, often even a future in 5 weeks. There's a natural tendency to try to protect yourself by hiding away from the world. This may mean adopting a hermetic lifestyle for some, but for me it meant driving myself into goals - one after another. One distraction after another.

Yet, I don't see it that way anymore. Those were the goals that I needed to do so that I could manage the illness and continue living. And my goals changed constantly, because they followed my values. Values which, as Kalanithi says

The tricky part of illness is that, as you go through it, your values are constantly changing. You try to figure out what matters to you, and then you keep figuring it out.

There is no real stopping point. Because you're always reminded of your finnitude. Every morning and night when you pop the cocktail of 15 pills, you contemplate on your values and what it means to live a meaningful life. Naturally, time changes your answers.

It was a short book. It conveys a sense of such urgency. With the finnitude of life staring at him, he wrote with such purpose. But, all the while he wrote with such intimacy that referring to him by his last name felt foreign. But I would not call his writing sad.

Yes, he died in the end. As we all will, but this book testifies that he lived.