Quote:
“Even if I’m dying, until I actually die, I am still living.”
Once a physician, now a Stage-IV lung cancer patient, at the very beginning of his potential shining career at his 30s – he then started to contemplate on life and death, illness, science, etc.
In the book, the physician and patient brings up a lot of good points – “The physician’s duty is not to stave off death or return patients to their old lives, but to … (help the patients to) stand back up and face, and makes sense of, their own existence.” “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.”
It’s never too early to think about death, in my opinion. It’s the unavoidable fate for all human beings; but as the author argued, we can’t feel it when it’s not approaching. “Before my cancer was diagnosed, I knew that someday I would die, but I didn’t know when. After the diagnosis, I knew that someday I would die, but I didn’t know when. But I knew it acutely.”
Personally, I can relate to a lot of details in the book because of my aunt’s recent diagnose of terminal cancer. I started to contemplate a lot even though I am not the patient. I love his openness about his feelings and emotions, and his beautiful language to describe his mental world.
This book hits me hard. If you also wonder about death sometimes, check it out.
-- Lisa Liang
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