Mortality

by Christopher Hitchens

These things may include your taste buds, your ability to concentrate, your ability to digest, and the hair on your head.

Voltaire, who, when badgered on his deathbed and urged to renounce the devil, murmured that this was no time to be making enemies.

“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. But it did find a small but interesting negative correlation, in that some patients suffered slight additional woe when they failed to manifest any improvement. They felt that they had disappointed

“If anyone can beat this, you can”; “Cancer has no chance against someone like you”; “We know you can vanquish this.” On bad days, and even on better ones, such exhortations can have a vaguely depressing effect. If I check out, I’ll be letting all these comrades down. A

Prayer: A petition that the laws of nature be suspended in favor of the petitioner; himself confessedly unworthy.

As against all that, I did get a kind note from a Cheyenne–Arapaho friend of mine, saying that everyone she knew who had resorted to tribal remedies had died almost immediately, and suggesting that if I was offered any Native American medicines I should “move as fast as possible in the opposite direction.” Some advice can actually be taken.

room for a short handbook of cancer etiquette. This would apply to sufferers as well as to sympathizers. After all, I have hardly been reticent about my own malady. But nor do I walk around sporting a huge lapel button that reads, ASK ME ABOUT STAGE FOUR METASTASIZED ESOPHAGEAL CANCER, AND ONLY ABOUT THAT.

One almost develops a kind of elitism about the uniqueness of one’s own personal disorder.

“A bit early to say.”

I'll use that

The swiftest way of doing this is to note that the thing about Stage Four is that there is no such thing as Stage Five. Quite

Ha

Cancer victimhood contains a permanent temptation to be self–centered and even solipsistic.

Indeed

LIKE SO MANY OF LIFE ’S VARIETIES OF EXPERIENCE, the novelty of a diagnosis of malignant cancer has a tendency to wear off.

Hasn't worn off me yet - but it's only been 2 years

“If It Be Your Will.” It’s a tiny bit saccharine, but it’s beautifully rendered and it opens like this: If it be your will, That I speak no more, And my voice be still, As it was before…

For me, to remember friendship is to recall those conversations that it seemed a sin to break off:

Death has this much to be said for it: You don’t have to get out of bed for it. Wherever you happen to be They bring it to you—free. —Kingsley Amis

discomfort?” This is made additionally problematic by the tendency of modern medicine to fall back on the use of euphemistic words in any case, the polite evasion of the weak “discomfort” being one of the most salient of these.

(Galileo Galilei was allegedly exposed to this while undergoing the graduated pressure that eventually squeezed him to recant.)

In some of the fervent paintings of the grand autos-da-fe, or “acts of faith,” not I think excluding some of the burnings alive captured by Goya on the Plaza Mayor, we see the flame and the smoke arising from the vicinity of the victim, and then the cross itself held grimly aloft before his closing eyes. I

The operators of that famous hospital should be ashamed of the historic role played by their order in the appalling legalization and application of torture,

Must take absolute care not to be self–pitying or self–centered.

there’s plenty of future time in which to be unconscious.

he admitted cowardice and panic alongside curiosity and occasional courage. His account sounded completely authentic: this was what living with cancer entailed; nor did being ill make you a different

Also, ordinary expressions like “expiration date”…will I outlive my Amex? My driver’s license? People say

Thats exactly what happens. I just renewed my passport - will it outlive me? My dog, who is 3, will I go before my best mate who has been in step with me during this experience.

I’m in town on Friday: will you be around? WHAT A QUESTION!

Wow!!!

AND you lose weight but cancer isn’t interested in eating your flab. It wants your muscle. The Tumortown Diet ain’t much help.

Too true Ive dropped over 15kg but still have a belly and man boobs!!

If I convert it’s because it’s better that a believer dies than that an atheist does.

Hahahaha

With infinite life comes an infinite list of relatives. Grandparents never die, nor do great-grandparents, great-aunts…and so on, back through the generations, all alive and offering advice. Sons never escape from the shadows of their fathers. Nor do daughters of their mothers. No one ever comes into his own…Such is the cost of immortality. No person is whole. No person is free.

So so true