Free Mortality by Christopher Hitchens Page B

the IV bags being changed—nothing kept him from holding court, making a point or an argument or hitting a punchline for his “guests.” He listened and drew us out, and had us all laughing. He was always asking for and commenting on another newspaper, another magazine, another novel, another review copy. We stood around his bed and reclined on plastic upholstered chairs as he made us into participants in his Socratic discourses.
    One night he was coughing up blood and was wheeled into the ICU for a hastily scheduled bronchoscopy. I alternated between watching over him and sleeping in a convertible chair. We lay side by side in our single beds. At one point we both woke up and started burbling like children at a sleepover party. At the time, this was the best it was going to get.
    When he came to following the bronchoscopy, after the doctor told him the trouble in his windpipe was not cancer but rather pneumonia, he was still intubated but avidly scribbling notes and questions about every conceivable subject. I saved the pages of paper on which he wrote his side of the conversation. There are sweet-nothings and a picture he drew on the top of the first page and then:
    Pneumonia? What type?
    Am I cancer free?
    Pain is hard to remember, right now, 4 to 5.
    He asked after the children, and my father.
    How’s Edwin? Tell him I asked.
    I worry about him
    ’Cos I love him.
    I want to hear him.
    Slightly down the page he wrote what he wanted me to bring him from our guesthouse in Houston:
    Nietzsche, Mencken and Chesterton books. Plus all random bits paper…Maybe in one hold-all bag. Look in the drawers! Bedside, etc. Up and downstairs.
    That night a dear family friend arrived from New York and was in the room when, in one of his nocturnal interludes of wakefulness and energy Christopher flashed an open, wide smile around the tube still running down his throat and wrote on his clipboard:
    I’m staying here [in Houston] until I’m cured. And then I’m taking our families on a vacation to Bermuda.
    The next morning, after they took the tube out, I came into his room to find him smiling his foxlike grin at me.
    “Happy anniversary!” he called out.
    A nurse came in with a small white cake, paper plates and plastic forks.…
    Another wedding anniversary: We are reading the newspaper on the terrace in our suite in a New York hotel. It is a faultless fall day. Our two-year-old daughter is sitting contentedly beside us, drinking a bottle. She climbs off her chair and squats down, inspecting something on the ground. She pulls the bottle out of her mouth, calls to me and points to a large, motionless bumble bee. She is alarmed, shaking her head back and forth, as if to say “No, no, no!”
    “The bee stopped,” she says. Then she makes a command: “Make it start.”
    Back then she believed I had the power to reanimate the dead. I don’t recall what I said to her about the bee. What I do recall are the words “Make it start.” Christopher then lifted her into his lap and consoled and distracted her with a change of subject and humor. Just as he would, with all of his children, so many years later, when he was ill.
    I miss his perfect voice. I heard it day and night, night and day. I miss the first happy trills when he woke; the low octaves of “his morning voice” as he read me snippets from the newspaper that outraged or amused him; the delighted and irritated (mostly irritated) registers as I interrupted him while he read; the jazz-tone riffs of him “talking down the line” to a radio station from the kitchen phone as he cooked lunch; his chirping, high-note greeting when our daughter came home from school; and his last soothing, pianissimo chatterings on retiring late at night.
    I miss, as his readers must, his writer’s voice, his voice on the page. I miss the unpublished Hitch: the countless notes he left for me in the entryway, on my pillow, the emails he would send while we sat in different rooms in our apartment