Healing Stories: Memoir as Testimony in the Classroom

In my English and Medical Humanities class, I include Christian writers who have
faced death and written well about it, and found students receptive to the experience of
reading and discussing the subject. The physician-writer Paul Kalanithi’s memoir, When
Breath Become Air, beautifully illustrates the power of language and literature to help
face issues of loss, whether loss of faith or loss of one’s life.
Paul loved literature in both undergraduate and graduate school, but also was drawn
to medicine. The day came when he heard a calling to put his learning into direct
practice, specifically that of healing. As a medical student and resident surgeon who
saw his work as ministry, he cared deeply for his patients.
However, having left the study of literature to immerse himself in practicing medicine,
he returned to it when he was diagnosed with an aggressive form of cancer. Reading
literary works helped him face the heavy emotional weight of caring for his patients as
he battled his own disease. He writes, “Torn between being a doctor and being a
patient, delving into medical science and turning back to literature for answers, I
struggled, while facing my own death, to rebuild my old life—or perhaps find a new
one.”
While facing the prospect of his own death, Paul also confronts his loss of faith.
Though his younger years in a Christian home had been filled with a nightly ritual of
prayer and scripture reading, he gradually exchanged his early faith for a more
scientific, materialist view. He succumbed to the temptation of believing only those
things that can be seen, felt, or measured.
Eventually, facing his impending death, he reclaims his former faith: “Yet I returned to
the central values of Christianity—sacrifice, redemption, forgiveness—because I found
them so compelling.” Though Paul eventually exchanges his own “breath for air,”
meaning he loses his fight with cancer, it was faith and a love of literature and language
that helped to give him a solid framework for facing mortality.
Paul died while working on his unfinished manuscript but left us a memoir that has
enriched our classroom with its spiritual and emotional power. By reading texts that
grapple with the heaviest of subjects—loss—students can experience the power of
literature to strengthen their faith.