One day lived is one day less and closer to eternity.
Do you grapple with the questions of what it means to live a meaningful life? Maybe not, but it's inevitable when you realize that your clock to eternity is ticking. Especially when diagnosed with a terminal illness.
Paul Kalanithi was a young talented neurosurgeon who after his excellence in the crèm de la crèm of schools (Stanford, Cambridge & Yale) was destined for greatness.
At the age of 36, as he approached the pinnacle of his career, after almost a decade of his residency and having dedicated his life to saving others and cutting through their brains, he was diagnosed with stage IV lung cancer.
As he writes, "Doctors invade the body in every way imaginable. They see people at their most vulnerable, their most scared, their most private. They escort them into the world, and then back out."
And as he and Lucy his wife stared at the CT scan images with tear soaked eyes, the diagnosis was clear - with cancer having invaded multiple organ systems.
A physician now turned patient started his treatment journey. Physical therapy, chemotherapy, but it all failed. And with that he writes,
"the future I had imagined, the one just about to be realized, the culmination of decades of striving, evaporated."
Throughout his book, he asks questions about life & death and how the two are connected.
Over the years, he had developed a thick skin towards seeing blood and breaking the bad news to the families of the deceased but nothing had prepared him for his own mortality.
According to the book, we know how this ends...Paul Kalanithi got to live for 22 months after his diagnosis. He died 8 months after the birth of their daughter Cady, in a hospital bed surrounded by his family. In the same hospital that he had saved lives, made friends, welcomed his daughter and now, he breathed his last.
"The truth that you live one day at a time didn't help: What was I supposed to do with that day?"
And as I turn the pages towards the end, I realize that "When breath becomes air" is incomplete derailed by Paul's rapid decline. He didn't get to finish his manuscript but ends with a note to Cady his daughter. And as his death wish was, the book was published in 2016, shortly after his death.
As I read this book, I couldn't help but think about my own mortality. How each passing day ticked off the calendar is leading me to eternity. Like Paul Kalanithi, I started to wonder what it is that I am doing with my life now. Circumstances change and so do priorities but I realized that perspective makes the difference. So what does it mean to live, to really live?
You know that analogy of the glass being half full or half empty? That's it. That's the answer to living life in perspective.
