“Meaning, while a slippery concept, seemed inextricable from human relationships and moral values”. Intending to find the ‘meaning’ of life, 36-year-old Paul Kalanithi pursues a career and devotes his life to a neurosurgeon. But everything takes a turn when the doctor turns a patient himself. The book is the journey of the author who was once an actor but now is acted upon. The direct experience that he believed would help to generate the answers to his complex questions, was finally revealed to him, but through his life. Dr. Paul Kalanithi was diagnosed with lung cancer at a moment in his life when youth holds so much value, and the future he had planned for years became nothing in a short period. For a well-known and experienced neurosurgeon who had dealt with many patients over the years, it was an entirely different period of life.
Dr. Paul Kalanithi, though initially interested in literature and striving for a career in the same, gets interested in the functioning, or as he says, ‘life of the mind’, leading him towards biology and neuroscience. Medical education aided him in better comprehending the link between meaning, life, and death. The doctor works with a variety of neurological patients and believes that attempting to comprehend the patients' pain will provide him with insight into how the meaning of life is determined. Though neurosurgery is difficult in and of itself and only a few people choose it, Dr. Paul sees it as a calling to safeguard lives and identities, and he devotes his life to learning about patients, treating them, and saving countless lives. But the more he observes lives being lived, the more he sees death. During the entire course of his career, he had been through equal pathways of success and failure, which gave him nothing or everything. But as it is said, things only known face to face will provide you an understanding of the true feeling of it. Dr. Paul is met by death itself to give him the answer and a better understanding of the particularities of death which he couldn’t acquire through literature, the history of medicine, or even neurosurgery.
Dr. Paul learns about the intersection of a person's personal, medical, and spiritual lives by paying visitations to death in various ways. One clear learning for him was that a physician's job was not to get rid of death and return people to their former lives but to try to rebuild the patient's and family's fragmented lives and make meaning of their life by addressing it, as his present physician had been working for him. Dr. Paul had always worked towards the responsibility and saving of the patient’s life, ignoring the emotional and physical uncertainties that hung on with them.
Personally, I prefer non-fiction and especially autobiographies as they give me an insight into their ideologies and how people perceive things around them. We, humans, are unique from one another, and I get awe-stricken by how our small brain is capable of creating a new world while could destroy another. Though this book is sad, it has many ideas that will get you thinking. As a part of the paramedical field and having to deal with clients myself in the future, I was able to relate to the major, complex questions that were wandering in the mind of the author. One such important aspect was how we understand the pain or feeling of someone. Though the quality of empathy still exists, won't it include the life of the person going through it, their family, their social environment, their physical well-being, and so on? Whatever that mattered to them then, means nothing now. Especially for someone living with a terminal disease, it is a process by itself. When the whole life of the person is falling apart right before them, giving them hope and saying “This is not the end”, is it worth it? What is the exact purpose that anyone lives for, when in the end there is nothing left for us to take, or what kind of life is worth living, whether life or death? Will any of us trade our or our loved one’s ability to have anything that we lack in life or to replace the suffering we have? Is death better than all the pain or how much suffering are we ready to endure before death? If so, what makes life meaningful enough to continue living? These questions have always been there, and this book triggered them back for me. We would never know unless we directly experience it. But then, when we get one, we lose something else. Everyone has a purpose in their life that they are striving to discover. Moreover, there is only a part of our lives that we have under our control. The others are far from our comprehension for a speck-like existence like us, living among the immensity of the universe. That is how life has been from my perspective as well.
In the earlier parts of the book, the author discusses how language and relationships play an important role. I admired the way he puts forth language as a supernatural force that exists between people that brings our brains into communion. It was beautifully written on how just a word could mean so much between two people. Some words would have an entirely different meaning between two best friends. I accept the fact that human relationality is a major element in the journey of someone’s life, which firmly holds meaning. Life’s meaning and virtues are determined by the depth of the relationship. As people say, someone is lucky because they have found good people around them. Humans are social animals, and hence the need to have people in their life is great.
One of the lines as quoted by the author from ‘Religio Mecidi’ reads: “With what strife and pains we come into the world we know not, but ‘tis commonly no easy matter to get out of it”. From the time we’re born, through our life span, everything indicating ‘you’ is in our hands. The joy and the pain. Suffering is a part of human life that is inevitable, but it doesn’t form the crux of human life. Through the inevitable, we could still find joy and hope, form relationships, and ultimately can get to a point where the ‘meaning of life’ could be established, which again is subjective. The author also indicates how forming meaningful relationships – human relationality could also be one of the many ways to find meaning.
The idea which fascinates me the most is how every aspect of our life could be connected to the meaning of life, but we tend to overlook it. Our physiological body is made of organs, bones, and muscles, and each has its function. The whole physiology is related to one another, and a problem with one part will affect the whole body. The ‘language of life’ as experienced by passion, hunger, and love is related to physiology. The language, that we study and communicate with, helps us with developing meaningful relationships with others. Literature gives us an account of a person’s experience and also provides the richest materials for moral reflection. For the author, neurosurgery presented him with an opportunity to form and understand human relationality through direct contact with patients and their lives and also provided the most challenging and direct confrontation with meaning, identity, and death. Our relationships teach us something, our career, the hobbies we have and focus on, our society, our knowledge, the world, and the news we hear about the same, the skies, or even death, everything we come across in our day-to-day life teaches us something and has a part of the answer to the question ‘What is the meaning of life?’.
It was a pleasant experience to read through the book, which offered me a platform to ponder over the ideas that were lingering within and gave me different perspectives to understand life. “Death comes for all of us. For us, for our patients: it is our fate as living, breathing, metabolizing organisms”. Death doesn’t show partiality and visits everyone in their life. The time we have before is in our hands and how worthwhile we lead it is upon us.
The autobiography, more than ideas, I believe it provides a platform to go through the various questions that are present in each of our minds about life and its context. Although each of us would have similar questions, the ambiguity of the questions leads us to ignore them and carry on with our life. We just fail to realize that understanding the meaning of life and our purpose would get us to live in the moment. Personally, I feel living in the moment, though will not be able to give back what we lost, will get us to make the time we have on earth to be meaningful. The span of time is not in our hands and we can’t blame anyone or anything for our sufferings. The only thing that could be done on our part is to spend the time fruitfully, to our best ability, and lead a contended life. Dr. Paul Kalanithi, even though only had fewer years in this world, the contributions he’s made as a neurosurgeon are immense, and I’m glad that he decided on translating his own direct experiences back into language for others.