When I had heard about the book like many of you might have I thought it to be rather sad and tragic which it was in parts to be fair but not in the manner in which I had imagined.

All of us have at times must have grappled with the question of how would we face death?

Every once in a while the death of a loved one reminds us of our own mortality, of how fragile the balance is between existence and its cessation. And with the passage of some time we continue to go our own ways and finding for ourself the purpose of our own life.

When Yaksha had asked Yudhishthira in Mahabharata “What is the most incredible/wonderful thing?” At the lake where his 4 brothers lay dead, Yudhishthira replied “The most amazing thing is that even though every day one sees countless living entities dying, he still acts and thinks as if he will continue to live on forever”. And that has been the central conundrum for centuries.

But the death that we have been discussing about is different from the cessation of life due to a terminal illness. well are we all not terminally ill in the sense that we are slowly decaying and every breath we take, every second that passes takes us closer to that state which we call death. there is uncertainty however about when the time will arrive.

The author of this book faced death due to cancer and however way i think about it I'll not be able to put myself in his shoes about how one would react. That is one path that one has to walk in order to understand how one would feel. Yet the book was more about life than death. It was more about trying to make sense of all this incoherence between meaninglessness and meaningfulness.

Paul Kalanithi was a gifted writer and skilled surgeon. and however much he might have tried to resist the urge to term himself a patient or a doctor, it was the medical profession that shaped him and that gave his life meaning while he lived. The book came later.

There's so many insights about the way doctors especially surgeons operate, about how taxing residency is or how doctors deal with the moral quandary of choosing between trying to save a patient's life while rendering him in a invalid state mentally and physically or letting him die without a fight.

The book is a search for meaning, a post-death inscription or proof that “I lived” and “I lived well”. and we can all certainly lament his death just when he was about to enter the peak of his career. but cancer and death especially doesn't care about the niceties of life. I thouroughly enjoyed reading the book but I had a bad feeling in my gut with a few things mentioned in the book. Like when he was still performing surgeries while he was in excruciating pain and drugged with medicines and under chemo's effect I wonder how the patient would've felt with that information.

Thank you for reading!

Have a great day!

-MANVENDRA SHEKHAWAT