always wins.”
He also had to confront a creeping atheism spawned by his emergence
in science. “Although I had been raised in a devout Christian family, where
prayer and Scripture readings were a nightly ritual, I, like most scientific
types, came to believe in the possibility of a material conception of reality,
an ultimately scientific worldview that would grant a complete metaphysics,
minus outmoded concepts of souls, God and bearded white men in robes.
“The problem, however, eventually became evident: to make science the
arbiter of metaphysics is to banish not only God from the world but also love,
hate, meaning – to consider a world that is self-evidently not the world we live
in.
“Science may provide the most useful way to organize empirical,
reproducible data, but its power to do so is predicated on its ability to grasp the
most central aspects of human life: hope, fear, love, hate, beauty, envy, honor,
weakness, striving, suffering, virtue.”
So his choice was clear – as is his lesson: “I returned to the central values
of Christianity – sacrifice, redemption, forgiveness – because I found them so
compelling. There is a tension in the Bible between justice and mercy, between
the Old Testament and the New Testament. The main message of Jesus, I
believed, is that mercy trumps justice every time.”
Paul Kalanithi did not get to complete his book – not formally. But it is
complete, thanks to a tender and poignant Epilogue added by his wife, Lucy,
also a physician. Lucy not only lived and suffered through her husband’s
illness, but had produced a daughter just seven months before his death.
She says that in the last year of his life he wrote relentlessly, “fueled by
purpose. Paul confronted death – examined it, wrestled with it, accepted it –
as a physician and a patient. He wanted to help people understand death and
face their mortality.”
“Paul’s decision not to avert his eyes from death,” she writes, “epitomizes
a fortitude we don’t celebrate enough in our death-avoidant culture. His
strength was defined by ambition and effort, but also by softness, the opposite
of bitterness. He spent much of his life wrestling with the question of how to
live a meaningful life, and his book explores that essential territory.”
In the midst of suffering and tragedy, she says, they still felt lucky and
grateful. “Although these last few years have been wrenching and difficult
– sometimes even impossible – they have also been the most beautiful and
profound of my life, requiring the daily act of holding life and death, joy and
pain in balance and exploring new depths of gratitude and love.”
What they both experienced and what now stays with her is “the
inextricability of life and death, the ability to cope, to find meaning despite this,
because of this. What happened to Paul was tragic, but he was not a tragedy.”
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