Garden for Measure

My brother Jeevan had arrived at my bedside. “You’ve accomplished so much,” he said. “You know that, don’t you?”

I sighed. He meant well, but the words rang hollow. My life had been building potential, potential that would now go unrealized. I had planned to do so much, and I had come so close.

“When Breath Becomes Air” by neurosurgeon Paul Kalanithi in his last stage of life with metastatic lung cancer, published posthumously

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Dear Alex,

When was the last time your breaths were counted - say, for a minute or less?

Not that your passing in breaths would add up to another day, decade or dream. Not that the sigh or ring of your bounce could measure the depth or dearth of your breath. Nor the songs and icons sloshing in your head - they too flutter more faintly in the passing of our consciousness.

What matters to you, as meaningful as it may be for you, may not count towards an extra breath to account for purpose in me. We go to the garden, enamored by its zing of beauty, our sinuses cleared. To the garden we turn, impermeable to its magic, our sinuses cleared. The garden continues churning out oxygen and inspiration from sunlight; hips and stems sway in refrain; the Earth spins, the reel of celluloids buzz in transience or absence of you.

We know it silly to do arithmetic on the things in life that matters more - trust, hope, love, death - but much of our living has to do with measuring up, counting to the day of return on investment, inhaling stress with plans to manage distress. Even if you are not counting your worth, the actuary and tax collector will make the calculations for you. It is part of the job and someone has to get it done.

By the time you are done reading this line, a few breaths will have slipped out as unattended guests, moments falling to a shadow on sundial, the sun shifting to a day shorter for you. From the other end of the horizon a few hours ago, an earthquake of 5.1 in preliminary magnitude has rattled cribs, bridges and barricades created in the likeness to our envisioned beings along hundreds of miles on the East Coast, the strongest waves felt at the epicenter for over a century. What shakes them up can shape us too. We quake and breathe at the epicenter of unparalleled changes that parallel in vigor with our anguish unchanged.

Paul Kalanithi studied literature at Stanford and philosophy in Cambridge before devoting to neurosurgery in Yale. If we read his few essays and autobiography scantily perceptible through his final breaths, we would tether his credentials or ours to the wind. Because we could presume they do not matter to him or you. I met him in his written words and those of his wife in epilogue by incident: a retired cardiologist recommended the book to me a few years past in our farewell.

The brain and heart are not simply tissues pumped to existence by oxygen from lungs. We need more than elemental gases and isotopes measured in precise calibrations to take a breathe. An undertaking in daily exercise, your every sniff or puff, labored but automatic, expected though granted, in and out of garden and sun, heaves you to a flinch, a bluff, a kiss closer to your mortality and this is how you shall be measured as man.

Yours, Kate