Mortality

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Cathy Retzenbrink’s life changed forever as a teenager when her brother was hit by a car, leaving him in a persistent vegetative state for eight years before he passed away. Its whole malice—there I go again—lies in the fact that the “best” it can do is to die with its host. With almost unimaginable clarity, grace and wit, even for the master wordsmith we had grown used to. In these blinks, you’ll explore fundamental questions addressing death and life, the nature of pain and how we cope with them. Many a man has borne himself proudly on the scaffold; surely the same pride should teach us to think truly about man's place in the world.

Read more about the condition Very Good: A book that has been read and does not look new, but is in excellent condition. Commenting on the persistent metaphor of battle that doctors and friends use to describe his life with cancer (most of this book was published in Vanity Fair), Hitchens mightily challenges this image, for “when you sit in a room. He wrote that it was "sobering and grief-inducing to read this brave and harrowing account of his "year of living dyingly" in the grip of the alien that succeeded where none of his debate opponents had in bringing him down. He was scared of facing a slow, drawn out death and he knew that his illness would never end in him growing stronger.By turns personal and philosophical, Hitchens embraces the full panoply of human emotions as cancer invades his body and compels him to grapple with the enigma of death. Christopher Hitchens began his memoir, “Hitch-22,” on a note of grim amusement at finding himself described in a British National Portrait Gallery publication as “the late Christopher Hitchens. If you have ever delighted in Hitchens's talent for bringing quotes to new and vivid life, look at his use of Wilfred Owen to illustrate how the "aspiration" of moisture could trigger a flood of panic during his various pneumonias: "come gargling from the froth corrupted lungs/ obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud". Although people often forget to attribute it to Nietzsche, this phrase has become inexorably intertwined in popular culture and is often depicted in popular songs, poems, and wearable art.

Once a person is diagnosed with cancer, his only hope of survival is to get quality treatment, and fast.In the year between this event and his death in December 2011, Hitchen’s explored, at length, the question: How does living feel when you know the end is so near? Christopher Hitchens's own pieces are shaped like a fugue; the theme is death, his own death, and the voice in each piece changes slightly as death comes closer.

My heart and blood pressure and many other registers are now strong again: Indeed, it occurs to me that if I didn’t have such a stout constitution I might have led a much healthier life thus far.

An eighth and final chapter consists, as the publisher’s note informs us, of unfinished “fragmentary jottings” that he wrote in his terminal days in the critical-care unit of the M. I am a member of a cancer elite,” says Christopher Hitchens on 60 Minutes , curling the corner of his lips with his trademark charm, rousing his interviewer to laughter, “I’d rather look down on people with lesser cancers.