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]

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.

His cancer diagnosis was like a nutcracker, getting us back into the soft, nourishing meat of our marriage. We hung on to each other for his physical survival and our emotional survival, our love stripped bare.



[2/2]

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.