Lory

Kalanithi‘s story makes it clear both why medicine becomes dehumanized (it's hard to remain open in the face of suffering) and how powerful it can be when doctors retain a sense of the sacred mystery of their calling and the reality of the human core that is not only body or mechanism. This book is a record of a brave man's life and its writing an act of courage itself, the reading of which can help us face our lives more bravely too. Science and spirit are not opposites, but in their true nature belong together. It's the battle to bring them into harmony that is our true challenge today, and this book an eloquent example of that fight.

See my full review on The Emerald City Book Review.This is a very strange book. It is funny, sometimes hilariously so, but it's also disorienting and savage and mystifying. The premise is, to say the least, odd: a megalomaniac matriarch, along with various descendants and hangers-on, have gathered in her walled estate to await the end of the world, of which they expect to be the only survivors. Given that most of the characters detest most of the others, the mind boggles at what will happen when their already-insular social circle is made even smaller. Classic country-house scenes of deliciously venomous dialogue are interspersed with visions and mysterious occurrences that give the whole book the quality of a nightmare from which it is singularly difficult to wake. I kept wondering what it would be like on stage or in a film, though sadly, I don't think this has a chance of coming to pass.

Wow. Devastating and so important. This is not just a relational trauma memoir but a record of a spiritual battle, a fight for the grounds of reality itself. A fight in which we will all, at some point, have to make our own stand.

Let me never, never, never try to hold someone hostage to my own world view. That is the genesis of evil.

“I could have my mother's love, but there were terms, the same terms they had offered me three years before: that I trade my reality for theirs, that I take my own understanding and bury it, leave it to rot in the earth.” Ch 39

THIS is what the struggle of the “end times” is about, not owning stupid hoards of food and gasoline and guns, but the ability to own your own thoughts, your own understanding, and through them to connect freely with others, not walled off in fearful isolation. The “end” refers to the end of the era when this was not fully in our own hands. Now it is. A terrifying, amazing prospect. And some have made it through, but many others are falling to the temptation to give themselves up, to bury themselves and remain dead rather than risk true life.

“Once justified, I thought the strangling guilt would release me and I could catch my breath. But vindication has no power over guilt. No amount of anger or rage directed at others can subdue it, because guilt is never about them. Guilt is the fear of one's own wretchedness. It has nothing to do with other people.” Ch 40

Love the overall theme of spiritual training in a vaguely Celtic setting. The ending was a bit rushed, as with Wise Child. From former readings, I remembered most vividly the fact that Juniper's leaving a flaw in her Doran cloak that she thought no one would notice, resulted in her being injured by her enemy - a powerful image that stuck with me.

Reread this in 2022, three years after my first read. At that time it was an eye-opening introduction to the concept of covert male depression, something I had encountered in family members, colleagues, and even been seeing in action on the world stage without understanding what I was experiencing. The book is extremely helpful in identifying the dysfunction that plagues so many men and in articulating a path toward healing.

This path can only begin when an individual man himself decides to stop the cycle begun by relational trauma, and go a different way, a way of facing his condition rather than running from it and covering it up with addictive defenses. We can't legislate or force such a decision. But only if enough men make it – as the inspiring stories in the book show that many men are capable of doing – can our world survive, in my opinion. Among all the crises clamoring for our attention, this is THE central crisis. The others all stem from this one, especially from the addictive defenses with which men combat their depression.

During this reread I really longed for some discussion of how covert depression also affects and presents in women. Women may be more prone to overt depression, which is a more obviously disturbing, but ironically probably less dangerous form of the disease – because it has come out into the open and there is at least a chance of seeking help. However, women are also highly prone to covert depression as well, and I suffered from it for many years.

Real describes depression as a disease of “carried emotions,” emotions generally carried over from a dysfunctional parenting relationship, and I started to wonder about this in relation to the gender gap. Far from being a “women's disease,” as it's often considered, depression may be in fact a men's disease that women frequently end up carrying for the men in their lives, covertly or overtly. Men have trouble naming, cognizing, and processing emotional experience, but they are not less emotionally needy than women – if anything, they are more needy than women. Maybe their depression infects the women around them, who have more innate tools for dealing with emotional issues. And their presentation of overt depression may at least sometimes be a cry for help on the behalf of those who are too emotionally shut-down and repressed to do it themselves.

Unfortunately this often does not lead to the healing of the real, root problem, which is fundamentally one of failure to protect and nurture the fragile human core. Without awareness of what is going on, this failure gets transmitted unconsciously down the generations, and continues to compound and be strengthened. Those who present overt symptoms can end up scapegoated by others who don't want to fully confront the issues, while others with more covert symptoms are discouraged from revealing and releasing their pain. I feel as though that is what has happened in my family, with my own covert depression, and other family members who have exposed more overt symptoms and ended up as the “symptom-bearers” for those who don't want to acknowledge the hidden connection between all of us.

But I don't want to be one of the deniers any more. I really want to wake up now, and break the cycle of depression in my own family, and I appreciate books like this that are helping me. It is not about blaming anyone, but about uncovering unconscious patterns that have been controlling our behavior and harming everyone they touch. There is so much work to be done, but it is a source of hope to have a new orientation towards the problem.