Mortality

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An enormous number of secular and atheist friends have told me encouraging and flattering things like, “If anyone can beat this, you can”; “Cancer has no chance against someone like you”; “We know you can vanquish this. He felt the same way about well-intentioned friends who used toxic positivity to encourage him to “keep fighting.

His loss motivated him to explore that question in greater detail and ponder the impact of the voice on the human experience. But nothing prepared me for the early morning in June when I came to consciousness feeling as if I were actually shackled to my own corpse.The most comprehensive investigation of the subject ever conducted—the “Study of the Therapeutic Effects of Intercessory Prayer,” of 2006, could find no correlation at all between the number and regularity of prayers offered and the likelihood that the person being prayed for would have improved chances. The alien was burrowing into me even as I wrote the jaunty words about my own prematurely announced death. Christopher Hitchens devoted his life to the pursuit of knowledge and self-expression and he was determined to do so throughout his illness as well.

But for precisely that reason, I can’t see myself smiting my brow with shock or hear myself whining about how it’s all so unfair: I have been taunting the Reaper into taking a free scythe in my direction and have now succumbed to something so predictable and banal that it bores even me. It’s just a “coincidence” [that] out of any part of his body, Christopher Hitchens got cancer in the one part of his body he used for blasphemy?

Because although he wasn’t afraid of dying, he was afraid of growing weak and losing the qualities he most prized in himself. A book driven by his desire to look death squarely in the face and provoked by detractors who were certain he would turn to religion when confronted with it.

Because he contracted cancer of the oesophagus, he was also cursed with the knowledge that his illness would inflict the most personal insult: taking his voice before it took the rest of him. Finance is provided by PayPal Credit (a trading name of PayPal UK Ltd, Whittaker House, Whittaker Avenue, Richmond-Upon-Thames, Surrey, United Kingdom, TW9 1EH). It's the wry trace of self-knowledge at the end of that rhetorical triad (the pleasure he might have taken in the fall of his enemies he must now grant to them) that breaks the spell.Some of his friends tried to stay relentlessly positive; they didn’t know what to say, so they tried to tell him motivational stories about people who had beaten cancer. He knew that illness was a slow progression and he knew that he would likely lose himself along the way as he grew weaker and his intellect was supplanted by the pain. By contrast, we regularly take our blessings for granted and complain our way through the days, naively assuming that we have an endless number of days stretching out in front of us.

To them, a rodent carcinoma really is a dedicated, conscious agent—a slow-acting suicide-murderer—on a consecrated mission from heaven. One of these notes reads: "If I convert it's because it's better a believer dies than that an atheist does. The book's power lies in its simplicity, in its straightforward, intelligent documenting, its startling refusal of showiness or melodrama or grandeur. He decided that he wanted to push past the awkwardnessand confront the reality of what was happening to him. 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.I dropped by his apartment in Washington late one evening about five or six years ago to find him alone.