What Had Been Holding Me Back?

When Breath Becomes Air

— Awakening to Life in the Face of Death —

Young B. Lee

When Breath Becomes Air is the story of Paul Kalanithi, a promising young physician who, at the age of thirty-six, found himself confronting lung cancer.

Paul had spent seven long years training to become a neurosurgeon. With the completion of his residency finally in sight, he was filled with dreams of the future. Then, one day, he discovered a tumor in his lung. The cancer had already spread to his spine. The diagnosis was devastating, both to him and to his wife.

The physician who had so often heard his patients ask, “How much time do I have left?” now found himself asking the very same question.

Yet, in the midst of their despair, Paul and his wife made an extraordinary decision: they would have a child.

And so their daughter, Cady, was born.

Although his body grew progressively weaker, Paul completed his surgical training and received his certificate. Promising career opportunities awaited him. But their happiness was painfully brief. Before long, he passed away.

What moved me most deeply was not Paul's death itself, but the choice he made as death approached. How could a man standing at the threshold of death turn his eyes away from his own mortality and toward the beginning of a new life?

It was a way of living I had never imagined.

Instead of counting the days remaining in his own life, he began thinking about the years his unborn daughter would have before her. His own life was drawing to a close, yet his heart was opening toward a life just beginning.

Lately, I too have found myself thinking more often about death.

After passing my ninetieth birthday, I once asked myself, “How much time do I have left? Five years? Seven?”

To my astonishment, two years have already slipped away.

Now I ask myself again, “Are those numbers still valid?”

But the young surgeon's decision raised an even deeper question within me. Does preparing for death necessarily mean putting one's affairs in order and getting ready to leave this world? Or might loving a new life, even until our final moments, be another way of facing death?

After ten years of waiting, twin grandchildren were finally born into our family. But they arrived prematurely, after only seven months in the womb, and our joy was overshadowed by anxiety. My daughter-in-law endured a difficult ordeal, and several more months passed before I could finally hold the babies in my arms.

When the twins were about three years old, another granddaughter arrived unexpectedly. The joy this little life brought into our family was beyond words. Once again, I experienced how profoundly the arrival of a single new life could transform a family with happiness.

Perhaps that is why the story of Paul's daughter touched me so deeply.

In my heart, I wanted to raise both hands and applaud this young father who had welcomed a new life even as he faced his own death. Yet I also felt a deep sadness knowing that he would have so little time to spend with his daughter.

I ask myself:

Why, at an age beyond ninety, have I been so deeply moved by the death of a young physician who left this world at thirty-seven?

Perhaps it is because I cannot forget the image of two breaths meeting beneath the same roof: the fading breath of a father and the first breaths of a daughter whose life was just beginning.

Death was drawing near, yet Paul and his wife refused to look only toward death. By choosing to welcome a new life, they found a way to affirm life even in the shadow of death.

The birth of Cady gave new meaning to Paul's remaining days.

He wrote with the thought that someday his daughter might grow old enough to wonder who her father had been and what she had meant to him. He wanted her to know that it was she who had filled the final days of his life with a joy beyond anything he had known.

I lingered over this passage for a long time.

Life, I began to realize, is not simply about achieving success. Perhaps the greatest achievement of a human life is to leave behind genuine love in the hearts of those we cherish.

Paul had fulfilled his lifelong dream of becoming a neurosurgeon. Prestigious universities had offered him promising positions. Yet, at the end of his life, what remained in his hands was neither a professional title nor a handsome salary.

There was his beloved wife. There was his little daughter. And there was the warmth of the love he would leave behind for them.

Perhaps a human life is not measured by how many years we are given to breathe.

Whether it is I, who have lived beyond ninety, or Paul, whose life ended at thirty-seven, perhaps the true meaning of our lives lies in what we have loved and what we have left in the hearts of others before drawing our final breath.

The story of a young physician I encountered almost by chance now asks me how I should live the years that remain.

Paul Kalanithi's brief breath has already become air. But the love he left behind did not disappear into the wind.

His breath lives on in the life of his daughter, and the echoes of the love he left behind have become a living, burning breath within my own life.

October 21, 2021

Laguna Woods, California

928 words.