Enter your email Address

ENTROPY
  • About
    • About
    • Masthead
    • Advertising
    • Submission Guidelines
    • Info on Book Reviews
  • Essays
    • All Introspection
      Creative Nonfiction / Essay

      WOVEN: Bruises Around the Heart

      February 24, 2021

      Introspection

      Variations on a Theme: Radio Days

      February 23, 2021

      Creative Nonfiction / Essay

      The Birds: The Old and the Flightless

      February 22, 2021

      Introspection

      Variations on a Theme: Daddy Rocked the Baby, Mother Said Amen

      February 20, 2021

      Introspection

      Variations on a Theme: Radio Days

      February 23, 2021

      Introspection

      Variations on a Theme: Daddy Rocked the Baby, Mother Said Amen

      February 20, 2021

      Introspection

      Variations on a Theme: The End of the World

      February 9, 2021

      Introspection

      Variations on a Theme: I almost lost my calloused skin

      February 2, 2021

  • Fiction
    • Fiction

      BLACKCACKLE: Cain, Knocking

      February 24, 2021

      Fiction

      The Birds: A Bird Heart for Forgiveness

      February 19, 2021

      Fiction

      New Skin

      February 17, 2021

      Fiction

      The Birds: Skittering

      February 17, 2021

      Fiction

      Variations on a Theme: Larger Than Life

      February 6, 2021

  • Reviews
    • All Collaborative Review Video Review
      Review

      Review: Nudes by Elle Nash

      February 22, 2021

      Review

      Burials Free of Sharks: Review of Xandria Phillips’ Hull

      February 18, 2021

      Review

      Review: Censorettes by Elizabeth Bales Frank

      February 4, 2021

      Review

      Review: Bring Me the Head of Quentin Tarantino by Julián Herbert

      February 1, 2021

      Collaborative Review

      Attention to the Real: A Conversation

      September 3, 2020

      Collaborative Review

      A Street Car Named Whatever

      February 22, 2016

      Collaborative Review

      Black Gum: A Conversational Review

      August 7, 2015

      Collaborative Review

      Lords of Waterdeep in Conversation

      February 25, 2015

      Video Review

      Entropy’s Super Mario Level

      September 15, 2015

      Video Review

      Flash Portraits of Link: Part 7 – In Weakness, Find Strength

      January 2, 2015

      Video Review

      Basal Ganglia by Matthew Revert

      March 31, 2014

      Video Review

      The Desert Places by Amber Sparks and Robert Kloss, Illustrated by Matt Kish

      March 21, 2014

  • Small Press
    • Small Press

      OOMPH! Press

      February 24, 2021

      Small Press

      Dynamo Verlag

      February 17, 2021

      Small Press

      Abalone Mountain Press

      February 3, 2021

      Small Press

      Gordon Hill Press

      December 8, 2020

      Small Press

      Evidence House

      November 24, 2020

  • Where to Submit
  • More
    • Poetry
    • Interviews
    • Games
      • All Board Games Video Games
        Creative Nonfiction / Essay

        HOW VIDEO GAMES MADE ME BIOPHILIC

        February 12, 2021

        Creative Nonfiction / Essay

        How Zelda Saved Me: The Inspiration, Feminism, and Empowerment of Hyrule

        November 2, 2020

        Board Games

        Session Report: Victoriana and Optimism

        December 14, 2019

        Games

        Best of 2019: Video Games

        December 13, 2019

        Board Games

        Session Report: Victoriana and Optimism

        December 14, 2019

        Board Games

        Ludic Writing: Lady of the West

        July 27, 2019

        Board Games

        Session Report: Paperback and Anomia

        July 27, 2019

        Board Games

        Ludic Writing: The Real Leeds Part 12 (Once in a Lifetime)

        November 10, 2018

        Video Games

        HOW VIDEO GAMES MADE ME BIOPHILIC

        February 12, 2021

        Video Games

        How Zelda Saved Me: The Inspiration, Feminism, and Empowerment of Hyrule

        November 2, 2020

        Video Games

        Best of 2019: Video Games

        December 13, 2019

        Video Games

        Super Smash Bros. Ultimate is the Spirit of Generosity

        December 31, 2018

    • Food
    • Small Press Releases
    • Film
    • Music
    • Paranormal
    • Travel
    • Art
    • Graphic Novels
    • Comics
    • Current Events
    • Astrology
    • Random
  • RESOURCES
  • The Accomplices
    • THE ACCOMPLICES
    • Enclave
    • Trumpwatch

ENTROPY

  • About
    • About
    • Masthead
    • Advertising
    • Submission Guidelines
    • Info on Book Reviews
  • Essays
    • All Introspection
      Creative Nonfiction / Essay

      WOVEN: Bruises Around the Heart

      February 24, 2021

      Introspection

      Variations on a Theme: Radio Days

      February 23, 2021

      Creative Nonfiction / Essay

      The Birds: The Old and the Flightless

      February 22, 2021

      Introspection

      Variations on a Theme: Daddy Rocked the Baby, Mother Said Amen

      February 20, 2021

      Introspection

      Variations on a Theme: Radio Days

      February 23, 2021

      Introspection

      Variations on a Theme: Daddy Rocked the Baby, Mother Said Amen

      February 20, 2021

      Introspection

      Variations on a Theme: The End of the World

      February 9, 2021

      Introspection

      Variations on a Theme: I almost lost my calloused skin

      February 2, 2021

  • Fiction
    • Fiction

      BLACKCACKLE: Cain, Knocking

      February 24, 2021

      Fiction

      The Birds: A Bird Heart for Forgiveness

      February 19, 2021

      Fiction

      New Skin

      February 17, 2021

      Fiction

      The Birds: Skittering

      February 17, 2021

      Fiction

      Variations on a Theme: Larger Than Life

      February 6, 2021

  • Reviews
    • All Collaborative Review Video Review
      Review

      Review: Nudes by Elle Nash

      February 22, 2021

      Review

      Burials Free of Sharks: Review of Xandria Phillips’ Hull

      February 18, 2021

      Review

      Review: Censorettes by Elizabeth Bales Frank

      February 4, 2021

      Review

      Review: Bring Me the Head of Quentin Tarantino by Julián Herbert

      February 1, 2021

      Collaborative Review

      Attention to the Real: A Conversation

      September 3, 2020

      Collaborative Review

      A Street Car Named Whatever

      February 22, 2016

      Collaborative Review

      Black Gum: A Conversational Review

      August 7, 2015

      Collaborative Review

      Lords of Waterdeep in Conversation

      February 25, 2015

      Video Review

      Entropy’s Super Mario Level

      September 15, 2015

      Video Review

      Flash Portraits of Link: Part 7 – In Weakness, Find Strength

      January 2, 2015

      Video Review

      Basal Ganglia by Matthew Revert

      March 31, 2014

      Video Review

      The Desert Places by Amber Sparks and Robert Kloss, Illustrated by Matt Kish

      March 21, 2014

  • Small Press
    • Small Press

      OOMPH! Press

      February 24, 2021

      Small Press

      Dynamo Verlag

      February 17, 2021

      Small Press

      Abalone Mountain Press

      February 3, 2021

      Small Press

      Gordon Hill Press

      December 8, 2020

      Small Press

      Evidence House

      November 24, 2020

  • Where to Submit
  • More
    • Poetry
    • Interviews
    • Games
      • All Board Games Video Games
        Creative Nonfiction / Essay

        HOW VIDEO GAMES MADE ME BIOPHILIC

        February 12, 2021

        Creative Nonfiction / Essay

        How Zelda Saved Me: The Inspiration, Feminism, and Empowerment of Hyrule

        November 2, 2020

        Board Games

        Session Report: Victoriana and Optimism

        December 14, 2019

        Games

        Best of 2019: Video Games

        December 13, 2019

        Board Games

        Session Report: Victoriana and Optimism

        December 14, 2019

        Board Games

        Ludic Writing: Lady of the West

        July 27, 2019

        Board Games

        Session Report: Paperback and Anomia

        July 27, 2019

        Board Games

        Ludic Writing: The Real Leeds Part 12 (Once in a Lifetime)

        November 10, 2018

        Video Games

        HOW VIDEO GAMES MADE ME BIOPHILIC

        February 12, 2021

        Video Games

        How Zelda Saved Me: The Inspiration, Feminism, and Empowerment of Hyrule

        November 2, 2020

        Video Games

        Best of 2019: Video Games

        December 13, 2019

        Video Games

        Super Smash Bros. Ultimate is the Spirit of Generosity

        December 31, 2018

    • Food
    • Small Press Releases
    • Film
    • Music
    • Paranormal
    • Travel
    • Art
    • Graphic Novels
    • Comics
    • Current Events
    • Astrology
    • Random
  • RESOURCES
  • The Accomplices
    • THE ACCOMPLICES
    • Enclave
    • Trumpwatch
Creative Nonfiction / EssayReview

Lucky Day

written by Emily Weinstein April 6, 2017

When Breath Becomes Air was not the book Dr. Paul Kalanithi intended to write, one day, after he had practiced for decades as a neurosurgeon. He planned to write a book about what he learned when he cut people’s skulls open with saws, looked at their brains, fixed them, and sewed them shut again. But instead, Dr. Kalanithi wrote a book about what he experienced, dying of metastatic lung cancer, at the age of thirty-seven.

His widow finished the manuscript. Their daughter was not yet one.    

I had read some of the late Dr. Kalanithi’s essays, and when his book came out, I wanted to read it immediately. But I rarely buy books in hardcover—I live in a single room already crowded with them, and money is always in short supply.

When I put When Breath Becomes Air on hold at the Berkeley Public Library, I was 108th in line. A few days later, I found the book sitting on the shelf, part of a display titled “Lucky Day.”

“The ‘Lucky Day’ collection,” explained a placard, “offers users the chance to find in-demand materials when they visit.” Like how Springsteen picks a few fans at every show and upgrades them from the cheap seats to the front row. (A few months later, I scored Springsteen’s autobiography off the “Lucky Day” display on the mobile library cart at the farmer’s market. Was a more blue-state sentence ever writ?)

So I ended up reading a book about dying with a sticker that said “Lucky Day” on its spine.

Every time I picked up the book, the first words I read were: “Lucky Day.” Each night as I fell asleep, the book splayed across my chest, the last words I read were: “Lucky Day.”

Lucky Day. Lucky Day. Lucky Day, the words on the outside of the book whispered, admonished, hoped, pled. Inside the book, a man told the story of his short life and early death.

“Words have a longevity I do not,” wrote Paul Kalanithi. We write to touch this illusion of immortaility, to connect with people we will never meet and make them feel less alone, to help them feel things, and know things, not only about ourselves, but about themselves. To enter their minds, and yet in a way that would be invisible, even if Dr. Kalanithi were looking right into the gray matter in their brain. To make sense of our experiences in the world, even if we are using words to say the world, and our experiences in it, do not always make sense.

So when Dr. Kalanithi wrote, about finding out he would die and then getting to work on his book:   

“I was searching for a vocabulary to make sense of death, to find a way to begin defining myself and inching forward again. The privilege of direct experience had led me away from literary and academic work, yet now I felt that to understand my own direct experiences, I would have to translate them back into language.”

I felt, in the place beyond words, the truth of his.

My brother is a builder, a maker. Ever since he was very little, he has used his hands to make things. He had every building toy imaginable, and family albums show him carefully constructing when he could barely walk. He would make forts out of chairs, blankets, and pillows, and when we weren’t fighting, he would make a room in his fort just for me. “For reading,” he would say. I was always reading.

“Noah always built,” I said to my parents. “But what did I like to do?”

“Tawk,” they answered, in unison, in their New York accents.

Words—my first addiction, my sharpest tool, my greatest comfort. I can’t always do the right thing, I haven’t been able to find the right man, or even the right van, for that matter, but I can always find the right word.

They say, when I was little, before I learned to read, I had my books memorized. When my tired parents would skip ahead to hasten bedtime, I would smack the page and shout, “Read, read, READ!”

I put my iPhone to that task now. When I am falling asleep and can’t hold my head up, I can eke out a few more minutes of reading by setting the screen on portrait lock and reading a final page or two fully horizontal under the covers, with my head on the pillow, phone turned sideways. I just like the feeling of words coming into my brain.

As Paul Kalanithi lay—and occasionally operated–dying, he wrote a book. And as I slept and woke in the luxury of not feeling my days especially numbered, I savored every word, with the acute sadness of knowing that this slim, yet somehow encompassing, volume was all I would ever read from this author.

He had so much more to say, so much more to do. He had so many natural resources, and had so carefully stewarded them. He had two bachelor’s degrees (English and biology, double major at Stanford) and two masters, an English one from Stanford and an M.Phil in History of Philosophy of Medicine and Science from Cambridge, before he decided to become a doctor—a neurosurgeon/neuroscientist. He was perfectly prepared to be a philosopher of science, to write the narratives of medicine. He was already a very good writer. He could and would have been an even better one.

Kalanithi quotes Beckett, “I can’t go on. I’ll go on,” then, explaining his decision to return to the OR, “Why? Because I could. Because that’s who I was. Because I would have to learn to live in a different way, seeing death as an imposing itinerant visitor but knowing that even if I’m dying, until I actually die, I am still living.”

Sometimes it feels the opposite—as Dylan wrote, that “He not busy being born is busy dying.”

But it is not either/or, as it has become fashionable to say in California. It is both/and.

Paul Kalanithi was living, even as he was dying. And we are all dying, as we are living each one of our lucky, numbered days.

Lucky Day was last modified: April 6th, 2017 by Emily Weinstein
0 comment
0
Facebook Twitter Google + Pinterest
Avatar
Emily Weinstein

Emily Meg Weinstein is an essayist and blogger. Her work has appeared in Salon, McSweeney's, The Rumpus, Electric Literature, Adventure Journal, The Morning News, The Huffington Post, Climbing magazine, and other publications and anthologies. Follow her @emilymweinstein.

previous post
DIS•ARTICULATIONS 2017: April COLLABORATING POET: ashaki m. jackson
next post
National Poetry Month Featured Poet: Ginger Ko

You may also like

The Drama of Sexual Politics: Evan Fallenberg’s “The Parting Gift”

August 31, 2018

Between Grammars by Danielle Vogel

July 13, 2015

The Third Thought

June 22, 2020

WOVEN: My Precious: On Leaving My Abusive Ex-Husband and Being Left with the Ring

January 13, 2021
Facebook Twitter Instagram

Recent Comments

  • furiousvexation Loved this. Killer first line and such a painted picture. Bravo!

    The Birds: a poem ·  February 17, 2021

  • Deidra Brown Wonderful, moving work!

    The Birds: a poem ·  February 15, 2021

  • Ceres Growing up in a rural area, I've observed first-hand the disparate outlooks between urban children with environmentalist parents and children raised in the country. Modern agricultural practices...

    HOW VIDEO GAMES MADE ME BIOPHILIC ·  February 13, 2021

Featured Columns & Series

  • The Birds
  • Dinnerview
  • WOVEN
  • Variations on a Theme
  • BLACKCACKLE
  • Literacy Narrative
  • COVID-19
  • Mini-Syllabus
  • Their Days Are Numbered
  • On Weather
  • Disarticulations
  • The Waters
  • Session Report series
  • Birdwolf
  • Comics I've Been Geeking Out On
  • Small Press Releases
  • Books I Hate (and Also Some I Like)
  • The Poetics of Spaces
  • Tales From the End of the Bus Line
  • Fog or a Cloud
  • 30 Years of Ghibli
  • Cooking Origin Stories
  • YOU MAKE ME FEEL
  • Ludic Writing
  • Best of 2019
  • The Talking Cure
  • Food and Covid-19
  • Stars to Stories
  • DRAGONS ARE REAL OR THEY ARE DEAD
  • Foster Care
  • LEAKY CULTURE
  • Jem and the Holographic Feminisms
  • D&D with Entropy

Find Us On Facebook

Entropy
  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Instagram

©2014-2021 The Accomplices LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Read our updated Privacy Policy.


Back To Top