Michael's Reviews > Mortality

A book on the dark subject of death that lightens the load with straight shots of clarity, honesty, and a form of wisdom. For those who loved the cultural critic Hitchens as a voice of truth that perfectly balanced logic and wit, fear not the potentials for emotional devastation in this discourse on his own process of death from esophageal cancer. It’s short enough to be read in one sitting and contains no self-pity. He gave me some courage about my own mortality.

The book contains several essays inspired by his condition published in his usual venue of “Vanity Fair”. At first, he surprises himself by a relatively unemotional outlook:

I have been taunting the Reaper into taking a free scythe in my direction and have now succumbed to something so predictable and banal it bores even me. ... To the dumb question “Why me?” the cosmos barely bothers to return the reply: Why not?

He brilliantly delves into the language of cancer, such as the metaphors of the patient being seen as fighting a battle or subject to an alien invasion. He fights back effectively against those who publicly proclaim he was being punished for blasphemy (he published the book: God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything). He explores the paradoxes of prayer with riffs along the lines of Ambrose Bierce’s definition in The Devil’s Dictionary: “A petition that the laws of nature be suspended in favor of the petitioner; himself confessedly unworthy.” He moves toward some rules of etiquette for personal communications with someone who is dying, which is challenged by finding a pathway between throwing out lines of false hope and excessive advice and the overstepping bounds to claim exact knowledge of what one’s friend is going through. In one essay, he renders an outstanding analysis of the quicksand in the Nietsche precept of “that which does not kill you makes you stronger.”

Despite the poor prognosis, Hitchens took the route of chemo and radiation, which he likens to torture. His drive to live is uplifting, but far from Rausch’s path in his “The Last Lecture”, which he felt “should bear its own health warning: so sugary you may need an insulin shot to withstand it”. The inexorable progress of his disease and side effects of treatment are not dwelled upon, but are covered enough to highlight the wisdom of his conclusion: “I do not have a body, I am my body.” To me, his dread of losing his voice is his most poignant expression of his fears, as his explanation of why his sense of self resides so much in that sphere of expression, even in his writings, is exactly what we fans most mourn.

Short though this book is, it should be a lasting testament to what it means to be human. Some of the themes he touches on can be explored more fully in books such as Sontag’s examination of blaming the victim in Illness as Metaphor and Ehrenheit’s attack on the cult of positive thinking in Smile or Die. Instead, this book for me feels like listening to a friend, and the art of that, when properly recognized, makes good on Hitchen's effort to defeat the erasing power of mortality. Talking to his readers well seems to be a core of what he's after, suggested by his comment on a most favored response from a reader: "The most satisfying compliment a reader can pay is to tell me that he or she feels personally addressed."