Mortality

by Christopher Hitchens

filling me with the not irrational fear that I shall lose the ability to write. Without that ability, I feel sure in advance, my “will to live” would be hugely attenuated. I often grandly say that writing is not just my living and my livelihood but my very life, and it’s true.

Almost like the threatened loss of my voice, which is currently being alleviated by some temporary injections into my vocal folds, I feel my personality and identity dissolving as I contemplate dead hands and the loss of the transmission belts that connect me to writing and thinking.

In Yiddish, to call someone a shtarker is to credit him with being a militant, a tough guy, a hard worker.

I repeat, this is no more than what a healthy person has to do in slower motion. It is our common fate.

“PIC” line, by means of which a permanent blood catheter is inserted in the upper arm, so that the need for repeated temporary invasions can be obviated.

two hours until, having tried and failed with both arms, I was lying between two bed-pads that were liberally laced with dried or clotting blood. The upset of the nurses was palpable. And we were further off from a solution.

seemed absurd to affect the idea that this bluffing on my part was making me stronger, or making other people perform more strongly or cheerfully either. Whatever view one takes of the outcome being affected by morale, it seems certain that the realm of illusion must be escaped before anything else.

“Now you might feel just a little prick.” (Be assured: Male patients have exhausted all the possibilities of this feeble joke within the first few days of hearing it.)

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.

“Have you met with our ‘pain management’ team yet?”

What happens, you may have been told, is a “simulation” of the sensation of drowning. Wrong. What happens is that you are slowly but inexorably drowned. And if at any point you manage to evade the deadly drip of water, your torturer will know. He or she will then make a minute but effective adjustment.

Oh yes, they said with mild bragging, we have lots of little moves and shakes and twists that will get the job done and not leave a mark. Again, you note this pride in technique and its almost humanist tone of professional expression. The language of torturers …

Saul Bellow: Death is the dark backing that a mirror needs if we are able to see anything.

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

From Alan Lightman’s intricate 1993 novel Einstein’s Dreams; set in Berne in 1905: 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.