I lost both my grandfathers, two uncles, an aunt, a great-grandfather, and a dog before thirteen. Death is strange. It washes over you like a tsunami but passes (pun, not intended) in the blink of an eye.

I think growing up with quite a significant amount of death surrounding me changed my relationship with the fate which we all face. I learned to feel nearly nothing towards the subject. To not understand death. To chalk it up to someone simply not being there on that particular day. I remember making up solutions to death. I told my Mom that everyone who passed away got a cloud to live on.

As I get older, I struggle to decipher what it means to die. Becoming nothing seems too bleak. Going to heaven, being reincarnated, or some other theoretical afterlife—are all too stressful to consider.

So, how do we deal with dying while still being alive?

Paul Kalanithi, a neurosurgeon, died in 2015 at the age of 37 from a rare form of lung cancer. Diagnosed in his last year of residency at Stanford, he wrote When Breath Becomes Air to share his own experience with death, from the perspective of both a doctor and a patient.

In the face of this pandemic that claimed the lives of over five million people, a biography asking questions about the meaning of life is exactly what we need right now.

The bridge between humanities and STEM is what drove Kalanithi’s research. He studied literature, philosophy, and neuroscience to understand the “life of the mind” and what “makes life meaningful.” The intersectionality of these two disciplines is foreign to most Emerson students, but searching for the meaning of our lives is not.

Kalanithi explores questions like “what makes life meaningful enough to go on living?” The answer is unclear. And it changes as we face our own mortality, and the mortality of those we love. What is time, and how do we spend it? Without language, what does our life mean? Without one another, what drives us to keep going? How do you choose who gets to keep on living?

Neurosurgery taught Kalanithi how to act not “as death’s enemy, but as its ambassador.” He argues that when we lose the things that make us who we are, life is simply not worth living anymore.

When faced with difficult conversations with patients and helping their families grieve diagnoses or deaths, he never regretted what he did. He never felt as if it wasn’t worth the toll it took on him.

Pursuing our deepest desires often comes with a cost. But whether the price is worth paying is up to us. What makes your life worth it? What is your legacy, your impact? How did you come into the world and how do you want to leave it?

We are taught to look towards the future and work towards some big end goal. But what if we get cut short? What do you do with the time you have left? What about living in the moment and taking things day by day? How do you choose what to do with the time you have left when you don’t know how long you have left?

Kalanithi argues that while death approaches us all, it means nothing. Our expiration date should not dictate our everyday life. You must figure out what matters to you and live focusing on that. For Kalanithi, it was people and his legacy.

“Human knowledge is never contained in one person. It grows from the relationships we create between each other and the world, and still it is never complete.”

He died filled with joy, “a joy unknown to [him] in all [his] prior years, a joy that does not hunger for more and more but rests, satisfied.” He died surrounded by the things that made his life worth living. He lived believing that hardship and pain were important parts of the human experience and we should not try to numb them.

Kalanithi’s incredible story has forever changed the way I view death. Losing people will never get easier. But, trusting that their life was everything it should have been lightens the burden. To quote Michel de Montagine, “He who should teach men to die would at the same time teach them to live.”

As for contemplating my own death, I won’t spend time worrying about it. Time spent worrying about death while still living is time wasted. And we only have so long.

Living Next Door to Death