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.
Here is the world. Beautiful and terrible things will happen. Don't be afraid.
If you are living for an ideal and driving yourself as hard as you can to be perfect - at your job or as a mother or as a perfect wife - you lose the natural, slow rythmn of life. There's a rushing, trying to attain the ideal; the slower pace of the beat of the earth, the state where you simply are, is forgotten
Growing up in New Orleans as Archie Manning's son, I felt like a target, and I've always known that whatever I'd do, people would hear about it. So I've had my guard up, and maybe that's molded my personality.
No one wants to live in a wheelchair unable to talk, only winking once for yes and twice for no. It's perfectly reasonable that there will come a point where the balance of judgment of life over death swings the other way.
Life's just one great journey. It's a road we travel as we go from point A to point B. What makes that journey worthwhile is the people we choose to travel with, the people we hold close as we take steps into the darkness and blindly make our way through life. They're the people who matter.
In my prayers every day, which are a combination of Hebrew prayers and Shakespeare and Sondheim lyrics and things people have said to me that I've written down and shoved in my pocket, I also say the name of every person I've ever known who's passed on.
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