November is Lung Cancer Awareness Month. Are you aware?
Every day this month, one (or all) the cancer blogs I read profiles a person involved with lung cancer. Yesterday, Lisa at Every Breath I Take profiled Lucy Kalinithi, widow of Paul Kalinithi, a 37-year old neurosurgeon who died of lung cancer in March of this year.
It’s a lovely profile and spurred me to go on and read the essays on Paul Kalinithi’s website. One, titled ‘Before I Go,’ will be especially meaningful to anyone facing his or her mortality, if only for this paragraph and the sentence in bold:
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. [emphasis mine] Money, status, all the vanities the preacher of Ecclesiastes described, hold so little interest: a chasing after wind, indeed.
Spot on.
You can read all the Lung Cancer Awareness profiles here.
