Mortality

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And so commenced an 18-month odyssey through “the land of malady,” culminating in his death from esophageal cancer last December, when the plain unadorned phrase that had prompted him to contemplate his own mortality became, unarguably, true. Estranged from his family and with only his cat Cabbage for company, our narrator is shocked to find out he has only months to live. I managed to pull off both gigs without anyone noticing anything amiss, though I did vomit two times, with an extraordinary combination of accuracy, neatness, violence, and profusion, just before each show.

He was fearless in the field and relentless in his defense of the defenseless with that mightiest of swords--his pen. Because so many people are afraid of death and unsure of what to say, he quickly learned that his prognosis made his family and friends awkward. Second, would this anonymous author want his views to be read by my unoffending children, who are also being given a hard time in their way, and by the same god? But as against that, the death-dealing stuff and life-preserving stuff have also made me strangely neuter. When he was diagnosed with cancer, Hitchens saw how uncomfortable people are with the idea of death.If you should read this in time, by all means keep in mind that September 20, 2010, has already been designated “Everybody Pray for Hitchens Day.

He makes mordant play with the bloggers who posted remarks about how God was punishing his atheism by removing the voice with which he blasphemed. The first seven chapters are, like virtually everything [Hitchens] wrote over his long, distinguished career, diamond-hard and brilliant.The country has a language of its own—a lingua franca that manages to be both dull and difficult and that contains names like ondansetron, for anti-nausea medication—as well as some unsettling gestures that require a bit of getting used to. The night of the terrible morning, I was supposed to go on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and then appear at a sold-out event at the 92nd Street Y, on the Upper East Side, in conversation with Salman Rushdie. The alien was burrowing into me even as I wrote the jaunty words about my own prematurely announced death. During the American book tour for his memoir, Hitch-22, Christopher Hitchens collapsed in his hotel room with excruciating pain in his chest.

He is working now on the amazing healing properties that are latent in stem cells and in “targeted” gene-based treatments. Christopher Hitchens's own pieces are shaped like a fugue; the theme is death, his own death, and the voice in each piece changes slightly as death comes closer. For some, such stories might be comforting ‒ but Hitchens didn’t find them helpful as the stories offered no practical information on how he could cheat death. But irony is my business and I just can’t see any ironies here: Would it be less poignant to get cancer on the day that my memoirs were remaindered as a box-​office turkey, or that I was bounced from a coach-​class flight and left on the tarmac? A challenging author that through a very moving narrative of his relationship with cancer, invites us to think of life as something more than that which we usually do.This is a distinctly bizarre way of “living”—lawyers in the morning and doctors in the afternoon—and means that one has to exist even more than usual in a double frame of mind. If you have ever delighted in Hitchens's talent for bringing quotes to new and vivid life, look at his use of Wilfred Owen to illustrate how the "aspiration" of moisture could trigger a flood of panic during his various pneumonias: "come gargling from the froth corrupted lungs/ obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud". Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick," Sontag wrote in Illness as Metaphor .