Mortality

by Christopher Hitchens

People don’t have cancer: They are reported to be battling cancer.

The absorbing fact about being mortally sick is that you spend a good deal of time preparing yourself to die with some modicum of stoicism (and provision for loved ones), while being simultaneously and highly interested in the business of survival.

What if I pulled through and the pious faction contentedly claimed that their prayers had been answered? That would somehow be irritating.

It’s normally agreed that the question “How are you?” doesn’t put you on your oath to give a full or honest answer.

I don’t have a body, I am a body.

But again there was the unreasonable urge to have a kind of monopoly on, or a sort of veto over, what was actually sayable.

the novelty of a diagnosis of malignant cancer has a tendency to wear off.

When you fall ill, people send you CDs. Very often, in my experience, these are by Leonard Cohen.

I asked my physician to discontinue all life-supporting services or show me how to do it.

The physician denied this plea, rather loftily assuring Hook that “someday I would appreciate the unwisdom of my request.”

If being restored to life doesn’t count as something that doesn’t kill you, then what does?

So we are left with something quite unusual in the annals of unsentimental approaches to extinction: not the wish to die with dignity but the desire to have died.

If I had been told about all this in advance, would I have opted for the treatment?

This illustrates the whole business in microcosm: the “battle” against cancer reduced to a struggle to get a few drops of gore out of a large warm mammal that cannot provide them.

My husband is an impossible act to follow. And yet, now I must follow him. I have been forced to have the last word.

During this time of what he called “living dyingly,” he insisted ferociously on living, and his constitution, physical and philosophical, did all it could to stay alive.

Christopher’s charisma never left him, not in any realm: not in public, not in private, not even in the hospital.