Lucy Kalanithi: "When Breath Becomes Air" | Talks at Google

Dr. Paul Kalanithi’s wrote the #1 New York Times bestselling memoir -- When Breath Becomes Air. Kalanithi was a neurosurgery resident at Stanford and a loving husband when he was suddenly diagnosed with stage IV lung cancer. He died two years later at the age of 37, eight months after his infant daughter was born. His critically acclaimed memoir, finished with the help of his widow, Dr. Lucy Kalanithi, is a profound, searingly honest, and ultimately life-affirming meditation on the challenge of facing death and the relationship between doctor and patient.
What makes life worth living in the face of death? What do you do when the future, no longer a ladder toward your goals in life, flattens out into a perpetual present? What does it mean to have a child, to nurture a new life as another fades away? These are some of the questions Kalanithi wrestles with in this profoundly moving, exquisitely observed memoir. Paul Kalanithi died in March 2015, while working on this book, yet his words live on as a guide and a gift to us all. “I began to realize that coming face to face with my own mortality, in a sense, had changed nothing and everything,” he wrote. “Seven words from Samuel Beckett began to repeat in my head: ‘I can’t go on. I’ll go on.’”
This video: In Conversation with Lucy Kalanithi and Saurabh Madaan as Lucy talks about the process of shepherding Paul’s words and ideas into the world.
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