Free Mortality by Christopher Hitchens

quietly urge him on from week to week. But after a year and more . . . well, a certain narrative expectation inevitably built up. Hey, miracle cure! Hey, I was just having you on! No, neither of those could work as endings. Diamond had to die; and he duly, correctly (in narrative terms) did. Though— how can I put this?—a stern literary critic might complain that his story lacked compactness toward the end . . .
    Tendency of some commiserations to sound unintentionally final, either by past tense or some other giveaway of a valedictory sort. Sending flowers not as nice as it might seem.
    I’m not fighting or battling cancer—it’s fighting me.
    Brave? Hah! Save it for a fight you can’t run away from.
    Saul Bellow: Death is the dark backing that a mirror needs if we are able to see anything.
    Vertiginous feeling of being kicked forward in time: catapulted toward the finish line. Trying not to think with my tumor, which would not be thinking at all. People try to make it sound as if it were an EPISODE in one’s life.
    ONCOLOGY/ONTOLOGY: Under the old religious dispensation, heaven would simply sentence you to be lavishly tortured and then executed. Montaigne: “ Religion’s surest foundation is the contempt for life.”
    Fear leads to superstition—“The Big C,” though, seems mercifully to have dumped—and I’m glad nobody wants to slaughter any endangered species on my behalf.
    Only OK if I say something objective and stoical: Ian remarking that a time might come when I’d have to let go: Carol asking about Rebecca’s wedding “Are you afraid you won’t see England again?”
    Also, ordinary expressions like “expiration date” . . . will I outlive my Amex? My driver’s license? People say — I’m in town on Friday: will you be around? WHAT A QUESTION!
    COLD FEET (so far only at night): “peripheral neuropathy” is another of those words like “necrotic” that describe death-in-life of the system.
    AND you lose weight but cancer isn’t interested in eating your flab. It wants your muscle. The Tumortown Diet ain’t much help.
    Worst of all is “chemo–brain.” Dull, stuporous. What if the protracted, lavish torture is only the prelude to a gruesome execution.
    Body turns from reliable friend to more neutral to treacherous foe . . . Proust?
    If I convert it’s because it’s better that a believer dies than that an atheist does.
    Not even a race for a cure . . .
    Paperwork the curse of Tumortown.
    Misery of seeing oneself on old videos or YouTubes . . .
    “Gradual disclosure” not yet a problem for me.
    Michael Korda’s book Man to Man . . .
    You can get so habituated to bad news that good news is like Breytenbach and the cake. Consolations of saying, well at least now I won’t have to do THAT.
    Larkin good on fear in “Aubade,” with implied reproof to Hume and Lucretius for their stoicism.Fair enough in one way: atheists ought not to be offering consolation either.
    Banality of cancer. Entire pest–house of side–effects. Special of the day.
    See Szymborska’s poem on torture and the body as a reservoir of pain.
    From Alan Lightman’s intricate 1993 novel Einstein’s Dreams ; set in Berne in 1905:
    With infinite life comes an infinite list of relatives. Grandparents never die, nor do great-grandparents, great-aunts . . . and so on, back through the generations, all alive and offering advice. Sons never escape from the shadows of their fathers. Nor do daughters of their mothers. No one ever comes into his own . . . Such is the cost of immortality. No person is whole. No person is free.
    Publisher’s note: These fragmentary jottings were left unfinished at the time of the author’s death.

AFTERWORD BY
CAROL BLUE
    Onstage, my husband was an impossible act to follow.
    If you ever saw him at the podium, you may not share Richard Dawkins’s assessment that “he was the greatest orator of our time,” but you will know what I mean—or at least you won’t think, She would say that,