Madi’s Reviews > When Breath Becomes Air > Status Update

Paul is gone, and I miss him acutely nearly every moment, but I somehow feel I’m still taking part in the life we created together.


[2/2]

I expected to feel only empty and heartbroken after Paul died. It never occurred to me that you could love someone the same way after he was gone, that I would continue to feel such love and gratitude alongside the terrible sorrow, the grief so heavy that at times I shiver and moan under the weight of it.


[1/2]

Even while terminally ill, Paul was fully alive; despite physical collapse, he remained vigorous, open, full of hope not for an unlikely cure but for days that were full of purpose and meaning.

Most of our family and friends will have been unaware, until the publication of this book, of the marital trouble Paul and I weathered toward the end of his residency. But I am glad Paul wrote about it. It’s part of our truth, another redefinition, a piece of the struggle and redemption and meaning of Paul’s life and mine.


[1/2]

Alexander Pope: “A little learning is a dangerous thing; / Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring.”

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.


[2/2]

I began to realize that coming in such close contact with my own mortality had changed both nothing and everything.



[1/2]

There is a moment, a cusp, when the sum of gathered experience is worn down by the details of living. We are never so wise as when we live in this moment.

- excerpt from a short story written by the author’s friend

Literature not only illuminated another’s experience, it provided, I believed, the richest material for moral reflection. My brief forays into the formal ethics of analytic philosophy felt dry as a bone, missing the messiness and weight of real human life.

Books became my closest confidants, finely ground lenses providing new views of the world.