The Power of Story

I’m a sucker for Olympic stories. I’ll root for you if you give me a moving piece about your past and what it’s taken to get you to this place.

That’s why I believe this story immediately piqued my interest.

It’s not of the Olympic variety, but one of memoirs, a shared bond, and a love written between the pages.

I adore memoirs. I read both WHEN BREATH BECOMES AIR and THE BRIGHT HOUR, struck by the bravery, eloquence, and insight that two memoirists exuded as they captured the equally tragic and poignant perspective of what it’s like to be dying.

Both memoirs were published posthumously.

The spouses were encouraged by their dying loved ones to enter a new relationship or remarry after they pass away. The article uses the words radical permission to emphasize this.

And so . . .

John Duberstein and Lucy Kalanithi came together.

I’ve read these books. I understand this union is the farthest thing from a fairy tale box office bond. I love how the article I linked detailed one of their first interactions as obscenely vulnerable. I’ve always happened to believe great things come when we risk being vulnerable.

Finally, the article concludes with this hopeful message. “For now they are relishing their time together, in all its complexity.”

Because doesn’t that just say it all? Relish through the complexity. Relish despite it. Amidst it. Relish the time we have.

When a Book Inhabits

I’ve been spoiled by reading some great books lately. I’m reading a particular one slowly. I want it to last. I’m cherishing the messages within.

In WHEN BREATH BECOMES AIR, Dr. Paul Kalanithi faces his own mortality, after wrestling with conceptualizing this in his own patients for years. The book description states, “One day he was a doctor treating the dying, and the next he was a patient struggling to live.”

I find I gravitate toward books where the main character or memoirist faces a challenge that specifically presses into an area where they’ve grown accustomed to feeling like an expert or somehow contented. Reading a book like this becomes a lesson for me, grasping how people react when their lives are radically stretched, when the comfortable becomes severely uncomfortable. I suppose it cycles back to my fascination with humankind and resilience.

I’ll openly admit I think about life and death matters somewhat frequently. I can’t say if this is a result of my older sister being diagnosed with a malignant brain tumor in her late teens or if I’m just wired to think deep about such matters.

It’s lines like the following in WHEN BREATH BECOMES AIR that burrow beneath the minutiae of buying groceries and crossing off lists. “There is a moment, a cusp when the sum of gathered experience is worn down by the details of living. We are never so wise as when we live in this moment.”

And this: “Because the brain mediates our experience of the world, any neurosurgical problem forces a patient and family, ideally with a doctor as a guide, to answer this question: ‘What makes life meaningful enough to go on living?’”

Some books are quickly forgotten. Then there are those that inhabit us, they stay with us forever, influencing how we think and the way we view the world. WHEN BREATH BECOMES AIR has nested inside me.

Have you read a noteworthy book that’s inhabited you lately?