Mortality

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I had the time to wonder why they needed so many boots and helmets and so much heavy backup equipment, but now that I view the scene in retrospect I see it as a very gentle and firm deportation, taking me from the country of the well across the stark frontier that marks off the land of malady. What zeal this man had to eviscerate the conceits of the powerful, whether their authority derived from wealth, the state, or a claim to the ear of the divine. The night of the terrible morning, I was supposed to go on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and then appear at a sold-out event at the 92nd Street Y, on the Upper East Side, in conversation with Salman Rushdie. Author Christopher Hitchens was given his “reminder” when he was diagnosed with cancer in 2010 and was told he had less than a year to live.

Although Rebecca passed away in 2016, her book remains a euphoric, moving story of facing death and learning to live again. I was fairly reconciled to the loss of my hair, which began to come out in the shower in the first two weeks of treatment, and which I saved in a plastic bag so that it could help fill a floating dam in the Gulf of Mexico. Another positive review came from the magazine where Hitchens started his career, The New Statesman. The whole cave of my chest and thorax seemed to have been hollowed out and then refilled with slow-​drying cement. It also motivated him to encourage others to use their voices while they could and to cherish their ability to speak.

Over the course of his treatment, Hitchens had the opportunity to enter an experimental new therapy program that had the possibility to cure him. He also wrote the international bestsellers god Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything, Hitch-22: A Memoir, and Arguably. Once a person is diagnosed with cancer, his only hope of survival is to get quality treatment, and fast.

He wrote the best, most piercing, most clarifying prose of his career as he faced down the specter of his own demise. That’s how I discovered that my cancer had spread to my lymph nodes, and that one of these deformed beauties—located on my right clavicle, or collarbone—was big enough to be seen and felt. I managed to pull off both gigs without anyone noticing anything amiss, though I did vomit two times, with an extraordinary combination of accuracy, neatness, violence, and profusion, just before each show.During the US book tour for his memoir, Hitch-22, Christopher Hitchens collapsed in his New York hotel room to excoriating pain in his chest and thorax. Readers of his 2007 atheist classic, “God Is Not Great,” will get the frisky “convert” bit; more than a few of the pages in “Mortality” are devoted — as it were — to a final, defiant and well-­reasoned defense of his non-God-fearingness.

He is the man who brought the Human Genome Project to completion, ahead of time and under budget, and who now directs the National Institutes of Health.Of course my book hit the bestseller list on the day that I received the grimmest of news bulletins, and for that matter the last flight I took as a healthy-​feeling person (to a fine, big audience at the Chicago Book Fair) was the one that made me a million-​miler on United Airlines, with a lifetime of free upgrades to look forward to.