The most beautiful thing I have read recently is written by Paul Kalanithi. Paul authored the book, "When Breath Becomes Air." Months before succumbing to cancer, this brilliant neuroscientist and surgeon became a father. Shortly before dying her wrote,
"I hope I'll live long enough that she [his daughter Cady] has some memory of me. Words have a longevity that I do not. I had thought I could leave her a series of letters--but what would they say? I don't know what this girl will be like when she is fifteen, I don't even know if she'll take to the nickname we've given her. 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."
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