meaning of human life might actually be hidden in medicine and the history and philosophy of science, and so he becomes a neurosurgeon. As a physician, he questions his beliefs and his system of values as a man of science would. He gets a deeper theoretical knowledge of life and death and realizes that the values we hold dear form our identity and eventually affect the choices we make when we become aware of and ultimately face our mortality.

Because the brain mediates our experience of the world, any neurosurgical problem forces a patient and family, ideally with a doctor as a guide, to answer this question: What makes life meaningful enough to go on living?

When he is diagnosed with stage IV lung cancer, Paul realizes that his passionate pursuit of meaning during his youth has, indeed, given him extensive knowledge on the concepts of life and death; however, he only came close to answering his timeless question about the meaning of life when he himself became a patient. As he nears his death, Paul comes to understand that life is about accepting your pain and your suffering and aiming to strive above it. When you embrace your mortality and understand that death truly is imminent, you learn that your life is, in fact, worthwhile. Casting all theories and conceptualizations about the meaning of life and death and going simply by experience, he writes:

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. Money, status, all the vanities the preacher of Ecclesiastes described hold so little interest: a chasing after wind, indeed.

With one final look to his daughter, Cady—a choice he and his wife, Lucy, purposely made to symbolize his will to live and continue living, as well as to point out that finding joy in being alive and accepting the imminence of death might just be the greatest of human achievements—Paul concludes:

There is perhaps only one thing to say to this infant, who is all future, overlapping briefly with me, whose life, barring the improbable, is all but past. That message is simple: When you come to one of the many moments in life where you must give an account of yourself, provide a ledger of what you have been, and done, and meant to the world, do not, I pray, discount that you filled a dying man’s days with a sated joy, a joy unknown to me in all my prior years, a joy that does not hunger for more and more but rests, satisfied. In this time, right now, that is an enormous thing.