Also of value is the rare glimpse the book provides of prison life for a woman on death row. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled.

“Yet there is no other way to live.”

A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? She starts off angry and confused and soon moves to compassion and purpose.
In Houston, in the early morning hours of June 13, 1983, twenty-three-year-old Karla Faye Tucker showed up with two friends at the apartment of a man they hated, Jerry Lynn Dean.

Crossed Over is what I would call a memoir of violence. Should he and his wife have a baby? But by the time they left, both Dean and his chance, one-night companion had been murdered with such thorough wickedness as to ensure Karla's place among the handful of young white women on Death Row in this country. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession.

He was eighteen. She seems as lost about what to make of Tucker's death sentence as she is about what meaning to derive from her son's death. The title of the movie, Crossed Over was also the title of the book this movie was based on. Of course, then I had to read the book. But what we learn about Tucker's prison habilitation is instructive: her mother, a prostitute, was 13 when Tucker, the girl's third daughter, was born; Tucker started using drugs before she was 10.

“The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates.