Mortality

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Please only post requests for suggestions, not unsolicited recommendations or “should I read this book or that book” type posts. A challenging author that through a very moving narrative of his relationship with cancer, invites us to think of life as something more than that which we usually do. Because so many people are afraid of death and unsure of what to say, he quickly learned that his prognosis made his family and friends awkward. One thing he noticed was that the subject of death makes people awkward because many people prefer to avoid thinking about it. In one way, I suppose, I have been “in denial” for some time, knowingly burning the candle at both ends and finding that it often gives a lovely light.

The last section of Mortality is made up of "fragmentary jottings", which the publisher notes "were left unfinished at the time of the author's death". You’re sat in a hospital, still and rigid, with a transparent bag of poison being injected into you. Although he was deeply curious about what would happen when he died, Hitchens never doubted or surrendered his beliefs. He has been kind enough to visit me in his own time and to discuss all sorts of novel treatments, only recently even imaginable, that might apply to my case. It also motivated him to encourage others to use their voices while they could and to cherish their ability to speak.We’re so accustomed to enjoying our ability to talk that we never imagine what life would be like without our voices. As you literally stare death in the face, you have no choice but to consider what’s waiting for you on the other side.

Even as he lay--or sat or paced--dying in the unfamiliar confines of a hospital last year, the author had plenty to say about matters of life and death. He has allowed his dismantled confidence, his undoing to breathe, and to live in the pages, in a way that is startling and new and an achievement unlike his others, different in kind, yet equally ambitious and relentlessly honest. 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? Or for the way that my newly smooth upper lip would begin to look as if it had undergone electrolysis, causing me to look a bit too much like somebody’s maiden auntie. There he was forced to confront the weight of his mortality, after doctors diagnosed him with esophageal cancer.There is no solemnity in his writing about death but an uncluttered mind trying to make sense of it all, not just for himself but for you, too.

Working back from the cancer-​ridden squamous cells that these first results disclosed, it took rather longer than that to discover the disagreeable truth.Both Apple and Google state that they ensure that only users who have actually downloaded the app can submit a review. Hitchens was overwhelmed by the idea of his death; it’s true that most people don’t think about mortality until they absolutely must.

In fact, many of his friends and family members confessed that they were worried about his soul and pressured him to make a profession of faith. These things may include your taste buds, your ability to concentrate, your ability to digest, and the hair on your head. He is working now on the amazing healing properties that are latent in stem cells and in “targeted” gene-based treatments. The first seven chapters are, like virtually everything he wrote over his long, distinguished career, diamond-hard and brilliant. Cathy draws on her own experiences of the grief and depression that followed to assure the reader that, no matter how bad things may seem, they are not alone and there is always hope.Some of his friends didn’t know what to say, other than recounting “motivational” stories of people who had survived the disease. But his erudite manner in the way he strings sentences, the rapidity and beauty of his ability to talk in paragraphs, would stand him in good stead in the court room. Second, would this anonymous author want his views to be read by my unoffending children, who are also being given a hard time in their way, and by the same god? As he dealt with fatigue and nausea, with the anger, disgust and frustration that must accompany what he knew was a death sentence, Hitch poured it all into words as painfully honest as they were hilarious.