Mortality

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The duress under which they were written renders them sparer and less fluent than he was at his best. The notorious stage theory of Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, whereby one progresses from denial to rage through bargaining to depression and the eventual bliss of “acceptance,” hasn’t so far had much application to my case. It felt as though they were trying to ignore the reality of what was happening to him or that they were putting a positive spin on it because there was something shameful about him dying. Since a near-fatal and life-changing stroke in 1995 at the age of 42, Robert McCrum has had an unavoidable awareness of his own mortality, which has only grown as he’s aged.

If you maintain that god awards the appropriate cancers, you must also account for the numbers of infants who contract leukemia. Although we all prefer to use only the good passport, sooner or later each of us is obliged, at least for a spell, to identify ourselves as citizens of that other place.

The author and thinker Christopher Hitchens pondered these questions and more during his battle with esophageal cancer and Mortality (2012) is his answer to those questions. But irony is my business and I just can’t see any ironies here: Would it be less poignant to get cancer on the day that my memoirs were remaindered as a box-office turkey, or that I was bounced from a coach-class flight and left on the tarmac? An enormous number of secular and atheist friends have told me encouraging and flattering things like, “If anyone can beat this, you can”; “Cancer has no chance against someone like you”; “We know you can vanquish this.

He would stay up late drinking and talking, moving with judicious and delicious care from the large questions of the day to the small sweet business of invective, anecdotes and gossip. To them, a rodent carcinoma really is a dedicated, conscious agent—a slow-acting suicide-murderer—on a consecrated mission from heaven. Some of his friends didn’t know what to say, other than recounting “motivational” stories of people who had survived the disease.

But as against that, the death-dealing stuff and life-preserving stuff have also made me strangely neuter. He wrote, “So there it is in cold print, the plain unadorned phrase that will one day become unarguably true. The chest hair that was once the toast of two continents hasn’t yet wilted, but so much of it was shaved off for various hospital incisions that it’s a rather patchy affair.

The book's power lies in its simplicity, in its straightforward, intelligent documenting, its startling refusal of showiness or melodrama or grandeur.W HEN I DESCRIBED THE TUMOR IN MY ESOPHAGUS as a “blind, emotionless alien,” I suppose that even I couldn’t help awarding it some of the qualities of a living thing. In this beautifully written book of essays, Dr Oliver Sacks reflects with gratitude on his long, adventurous life, following a diagnosis of terminal cancer. The absorbing fact about being mortally sick is that you spend a good deal of time preparing yourself to die with some modicum of stoicism (and provision for loved ones), while being simultaneously and highly interested in the business of survival. 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.

Because he contracted cancer of the oesophagus, he was also cursed with the knowledge that his illness would inflict the most personal insult: taking his voice before it took the rest of him. Despite the book’s focus on his own death, Hitchens, as a staunch atheist, never fails to educate and entertain us about the Faith community’s contradictions. But on the side of my continued life is a group of brilliant and selfless physicians plus an astonishing number of prayer groups. On June 8, 2010, while on a book tour for his bestselling memoir, Hitch-22, Christopher Hitchens was stricken in his New York hotel room with excruciating pain in his chest and thorax.

Because of course, when Nietzsche made that statement, he was referring to the dark night of the soul, not a terminal illness.