I remember the embalmer saying that when friends tell him about a cancer diagnosis, he extrapolates that information to its most extreme end point – death – and I wonder if hearing of a cancer diagnosis will now mean, to me, black coral in a crematorium. From the look on Tony’s face, it’s a hard image to forget. It feels like burying someone with the murder weapon, like something we should remove. Christopher Hitchens described the tumour in his oesophagus that would ultimately kill him as a ‘blind, emotionless alien’. He later wrote, in his posthumously published book Mortality, that it was a
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