Metaphors reveal how a neurosurgeon narrated death while facing terminal cancer

A neurosurgeon's memoir, penned after his diagnosis with stage IV lung cancer at 36, provides profound insights into how death is metaphorically conceptualized. The study, conducted by researchers at the University of Sharjah and published in the journal Language and Health, identifies and analyzes 211 instances of death-related metaphors in Paul Kalanithi's memoir, *When Breath Becomes Air*.

Through the Metaphor Identification Procedure Vrije Universiteit (MIPVU), the researchers classify these metaphors into five major frames and 10 subordinate types.

Kalanithi predominantly frames death as a transition or movement, but also as a negative presence, an overwhelming force, a concluding performance, and a biomedical breakdown. The memoir demonstrates how illness discourse intertwines with personal and existential narratives, reshaping conventional death metaphors. Kalanithi's use of departure metaphors, for instance, conceptualizes death as leaving the world, moving from one state of existence to another, and converting it into a relational event between the dying person and their loved ones.

His recurrent use of these metaphors transforms death into a lived experience, far more than an abstract concept or biological process.

Kalanithi's metaphors also reveal his understanding of mortality through coenesthetic mappings, which shape people's experiences of mortality and influence their responses to death and mortuary practices. The researchers note how Kalanithi's shift from a neurosurgeon to a patient, from actor to one acted upon, and from subject to direct object, further highlights the metaphoric nature of his transformation.

Despite the inevitability of death, Kalanithi resists its finality, comparing his life to a candle wavering in the wind, uncertain of when the gust of death will extinguish it.