Most of you may guess that I’m not big into human interest stories (though I do follow celebrity gossip cursorily). But over the last week I’ve become moderately interested in the death of Paul Kalanithi. A little over a year ago his piece How Long Have I Got Left? was brought to my attention. The issue that he was confronting was that he was suffering from terminal lung cancer. It was particularly of note because Kalanithi was a neurosurgeon who was just ascending up the peak of his professional powers. Now, he was confronting disease and illness from the perspective of a patient, and it was making him reconsider some of the norms of medical practice. Despite his deteriorating health Kalanithi kept writing and speaking out in the media. His last piece, Before You Go, was written not too much before his death, on March 9th of 2015.
His story attracted my interest again because despite his terminal condition he and his wife decided to proceed with starting a family. On July 4th of 2014 his daughter Cady was born. He concluded his last piece of written work:
…There is perhaps only one thing to say to this infant [his daughter, Cady], who is all future, overlapping briefly with me, whose life, barring the improbable, is all but past.
That message is simple: When you come to one of the many moments in life when you must give an account of yourself, provide a ledger of what you have been, and done, and meant to the world, do not, I pray, discount that you filled a dying man’s days with a sated joy, a joy unknown to me in all my prior years, a joy that does not hunger for more and more, but rests, satisfied. In this time, right now, that is an enormous thing.
A minute after my daughter was born she opened her eyes, and looked straight at me. And at that moment I slipped beyond the event horizon. I am happy for Paul Kalanithi that he decided to embark on that last journey into the deep before his passing.
Second, does anyone know a good book about the “Age of Discovery”? I can’t think of one off the top of my head. A reader emailed me to ask, and I didn’t have a pat response.
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