Daily Times

Christopher Eric Hitchens
was an English-American author and journalist whose books, essays and journalistic career span more than four decades. He graduated from the independent Leys School in Cambridge and then went on to study at Balliol College, Oxford. Christopher Hitchens was diagnosed with oesophageal cancer and died after a long and brave struggle with mortality on December 15, 2011. Mortality is his last book and it was published posthumously.

It is a sad and inspiring account of a dying man with an introduction by his editor at Vanity Fair, Graydon Carter and an afterword by his wife, Carol Blue. It consists of seven dispatches he sent to Vanity Fair, which summarise virtually everything he wrote during his distinguished career. The eighth and the final chapter consists of unfinished “fragmentary jottings” that he wrote in his terminal days in the critical care unit at the Cancer Centre, which were left unfinished at the time of the author’s death.

In this very touching account, Hitchens describes the torments of illness, its taboos and narrates how disease transforms experience and changes our relationship to the world around us. He has written about how his many friends and enemies responded to his illness. There is a great deal of suffering and slow loss as he undergoes every possible treatment. As his wife, Carol writes, “He responded to every bit of clinical and statistical good news with a radical, childlike hope.” The overall theme of the book is death — his own death — and the voice in each piece changes slightly as death comes closer.

The condition of patients suffering from cancer, going through doses of chemotherapy, is very realistically and poetically depicted by the author. “Allow me to inform you, though, that when you sit in a room with a set of other finalists and kindly people bring a huge transparent bag of poison and plug it into your arm, and you either read or don’t read a book while the venom sack gradually empties itself into your system, the image of the ardent soldier or revolutionary is the very last one that will occur to you. You feel swamped with passivity and impotence: dissolving in powerlessness like a sugar lump in water.” At one point, he writes, “All the sleep-aids and blissful dozes seem somehow a waste of life — there’s plenty of future time in which to be unconscious.” The touch of literary genius is visible in every word he wrote; it does not matter if the topic under discussion involves a completely opposite dimension. “In the medical literature, the vocal “cord” is a mere “fold”, a piece of gristle that strives to reach out and touch its twin, thus producing the possibility of sound effects. But I feel that there must be a deep relationship with the word cord: the resonant vibration that can stir memory, produce music, evoke love, bring tears, move crowds to pity and mobs to passion.”

With hope fading away with every passing day, Hitchens realises how much he is losing, his voice in particular, and, in general, the fear of his ability to think in the days to come. When the cancer attacks his voice, his stoicism finally begins to waver. He describes the deprivation as “the amputation of part of the personality”. He also writes, “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.” He calls cancer of the oesophagus his enemy, “the blind, emotionless alien” that ravaged his body, robbed him of speech and affected his ability to write.

Despite his struggle, Hitchens examined and interrogated cancer with his characteristic doggedness. This was his “year of living dyingly”. The fragmentary jottings, as his end nears, are painful and deeply touching. “The alien was burrowing into me even as I wrote the jaunty words about my own prematurely announced death.” These include the loss of hope and the deepest of feelings of “not being there” or “leaving the party early” when the world around him is moving on with “ordinary expressions like ‘expiration date’ on my driver’s licence? People say — I’m in town on Friday: will you be around? What a question!” At one point he writes, “My father had died, and very swiftly, too, of cancer of the esophagus. He was 79. I am 61. In whatever kind of a “race” life may be, I have very abruptly become a finalist.”

The sickbed is a ruthlessly circumscribed world that Hitchens embraces to the full panoply of human emotions as cancer invades his body and compels him to grapple with the enigma of death. Hitchens is never self-pitying or scared. “I wanted to be fully conscious and awake, in order to “do” death in the active and not the passive sense.” It is an exemplary story of a man’s refusal to cower in the face of the unknown. It is a courageous and lucid work of literature, an affirmation of the dignity and worth of man.

The reviewer is a social activist. He blogs at http://drirfanzafar.com and can be reached at drirfanzafar@gmail.com