Post authored by: Christine Nguyen (Limitless Foundation Founder and CEO)
Originally Published: May 26, 2025
Welcome to the Limitless Library. In this new blog series, Limitless Foundation seeks to provide recommendations on books to help patients, healthcare workers, and caregivers, navigate their health journey. Books will span nonfiction and fiction and focus on a variety of topics such as healthcare provider experience, self-help, political / economic overviews of the healthcare system, etc. We will provide reviews, related resources, and a discussion guide for any book clubs for all materials reviewed on the site. Please note, opinions are all attributed to the author and do not represent the organization’s stances unless explicitly stated.
Review: 5/5
When Breath Becomes Air is one of the first books this year to blow me away. Paul Kalanthi describes in such beautiful prose the complexity of death and dying, navigating a cancer diagnosis, and making decisions for a life you will not be around for. As someone who is currently a significant other to a medical student, I especially appreciated how accurately he portrayed the stress of his journey training to be a surgeon and the impact it had on his wife. Kalanthi does not shy away from the realities of the long hours, the delayed gratification, and how the stress strained his relationship and marriage.
I, of course, am also heavily contemplative of my uncle’s death reading this piece back. I often wonder how terrifying it must have been once he relapsed to know this time the cancer would not be beat. The sense of urgency in the pages and the voice Kalanthi speaks are ones I’m sure he would’ve resonated with as well.
Kalanthi beautifully describes the tradeoffs of his ambition and the life he knew to accept and create his new reality. The love shared between him, his wife, and his family throughout the book is palpable. This book was a beautiful airplane read cry that I’d highly recommend to anyone navigating grief, looking for new perspectives on life, or simply seeking incredible writing.
Discussion Questions
- How have you navigated tough conversations with your significant other? How have you worked through those challenges?
- Have you ever had a life event or challenge cause you to significantly evaluate your plans? How did you address it?
- Have you ever watched a loved one battle cancer or battle one yourself? How did you find the journey of navigating the stages of grief?
- What constitutes a life of meaning to you? How do you feel you have lived up to that ideal?
- What are the most important things in your life? How would you prioritize them, and has that prioritization shifted over time?
- If there is something that you could tell your past self on what you have learned, what would it be?
- What did you think of Paul and Lucy’s decision to bring a child into the world in the wake of his death? Would you have navigated the decision similarly?
- As Paul navigates his diagnosis, his perspectives and sense of urgency shift drastically. Were there any transitions that particularly surprised you?
- What did you think of the impact of Paul’s terminal illness on his relationship throughout the book as we start with their marriage on the brink and end with her unwavering support?
- Paul explicitly asks Lucy to remarry after his death and to find happiness again. How would you want your loved ones to respond after your death, and why?
- What do you think your boundaries are for when you would no longer wish to seek treatment for a terminal condition?
Notable Lines
- “But I’m worried we want different things from our relationship. I feel like we’re connected halfway. I don’t want to learn about worries by accident. When I talk to you about feeling isolated, you don’t seem to think it’s a problem.”
- “And with that, the future I had imagined, the one just about to be realized, the culmination of decades of striving, evaporated”
- “I didn’t tell Lucy and me whether we should go ahead and have a child, or what it meant to nurture a new life while mine faded.”
- “Lucy and I both felt that life wasn’t about avoiding suffering.”
- “The tricky part of illiness is that, as you go through it, your values are constantly changing. You try to figure out what matters to you, and then you keep figuring it out. It felt like someone had taken away my credit card and I was having to learn how to budget. You may decide you want to spend your time working as a neurosurgeon, but two months later, you may feel differently. Two months after that, you may want to learn to play the saxophone or devote yourself to the church. Death may be a one-time event, but living with terminal illness is a process.”
- “Even when the cancer was in retreat, it cast long shadows.”
- “When you come to one of the many moments in your life where 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.”
- “We hung on to each other for his physical survival and our emotional survival, our love stripped bare.”
- “Paul faced each stage of his illness with a grace – not with bravado or a misguided faith that he would “overcome” or “beat” cancer but with an authenticity that allowed him to grieve the loss of the future he had planned and forge a new one.”
- “It never occurred to be that you could love someone the same way after he was gone, that I would continue to feel such love and gratitude alongside the terrible sorrow, the grief so heavy that at times I shiver and moan under the weight of it.”
If you or a loved one is experiencing similar struggles. Please check out resources such as:
–Cancer Care Grief and Loss Resources
– National Coaliton for Cancer Survivorship
–American Cancer Society Programs
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