I knew medicine only by its absence - specifically, the absence of a father growing up: one who went to work before dawn and returned in the dark to a plate of reheated dinner.
Interpretation
The quote reflects on the speaker's experience of growing up without a father, highlighting the impact of absence in their life.
In this quote, Paul Kalanithi expresses a profound sense of loss and longing related to his father's absence during his upbringing. He illustrates how the lack of paternal presence has shaped his understanding of life and influenced his perception of the world, particularly in relation to the field of medicine. The imagery of a father working tirelessly away from home emphasizes themes of sacrifice and neglect, revealing how parenting shapes not only personal identity but also professional aspirations.
In practice
During a speech about the importance of family, one could use this quote to illustrate the impact of absent parental figures.
Science is based on reproducibility and manufactured objectivity. As strong as that makes its ability to generate claims about matter and energy, it also makes scientific knowledge inapplicable to the existential, visceral nature of human life, which is unique and subjective and unpredictable.
Science may provide the most useful way to organize empirical, reproducible data, but its power to do so is predicated on its inability to grasp the most central aspects of human life: hope, fear, love, hate, beauty, envy, honor, weakness, striving, suffering, virtue.
Putting lifestyle first is how you find a job - not a calling.
The root of disaster means a star coming apart, and no image expresses better the look in a patient's eyes when hearing a neurosurgeon's diagnosis.
I have sat with countless patients and families to discuss grim prognoses: It's one of the most important jobs physicians have. It's easier when the patient is 94, in the last stages of dementia, and has a severe brain bleed. For young people like me - I am 36 - given a diagnosis of cancer, there aren't many words.
Everyone succumbs to finitude. I suspect I am not the only one who reaches this pluperfect state. Most ambitions are either achieved or abandoned; either way, they belong to the past. The future, instead of the ladder toward the goals of life, flattens out into a perpetual present.
Sometimes it takes a wake-up call, doesn't it, to alert us to the fact that we're hurrying through our lives instead of actually living them; that we're living the fast life instead of the good life. And I think, for many people, that wake-up call takes the form of an illness.
Life is not merely to be alive, but to be well.
If I had my life to live over, instead of wishing away nine months of pregnancy, I'd have cherished ever moment and realized that the wonderment growing inside me was the only chance in life to assist God in a miracle.
When doctors tell you that you have three weeks to live, you try to live a lifetime of moments in three weeks. But you say, 'To hell with three weeks.'
It's being a grown up, which I never figured out how to do, scrubbing the tub, and remembering to eat and shampoo my hair. It's the basics: I can write a whole book, but I cannot handle the basics.
Life plays the same lovely and agonizing joke on all of us.
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