Shantih Shantih Shantih

These are the words with which Lucy Kalanithi signs my copy of her late husband’s book.

I almost missed her reading. The Cherry Festival has come to Traverse City, and on Thursday my usual parking lot was replaced by carnival grounds. Rollercoasters and a ferris wheel, booths for fixed games and fried dough—it looks like Coney Island took a crap all over Grandview Parkway.

By the time I found a parking space and sprinted to the City Opera House, the doors were shut and introductory remarks had begun. I took a seat on the balcony, in a corner away from the crowd, and it’s just as well I did. I don’t feel the need to mask my emotions when I’m alone, and I listen better because of it.

Paul Kalanithi, author of When Breath Becomes Air, was a neurosurgeon who at 36 was diagnosed with Stage IV lung cancer. His book is about his life, his diagnosis, and his death, but mostly, it’s about how to understand life and death as a writer, a doctor, a dying man. No one knows what matters like a man who knows that soon, nothing will. No one knows how to live like a man who knows he is dying.

Paul Kalanithi had been caught between art and science all his life, studying literature and biology at Stanford before going to med school at Yale, where he met his wife. He’d intended to write in his retirement, but since that wasn’t going to happen, he put the last two years of his life into this book: a meditation on mortality, family, and love.

Shantih shantih shantih. It’s how the Hindu Peace Mantras end, with three invocations of peace to overcome obstacles physical, internal, and divine. It’s also how T.S. Eliot ends The Waste Land.

“The peace which passeth understanding,” is how Eliot translates shantih in the footnotes. I’m not sure if this is accurate, or just Eliot being pretentious (neither would surprise me), but it sounds nice, so I’m not sure that it matters.