Now, ballad, gather poppies in thine hands
And sheaves of brier and many rusted sheaves
Rain-rotten in rank lands,
Waste marigold and late unhappy leaves
And grass that fades ere any of it be mown;
And when thy bosom is filled full thereof
Seek out Death's face ere the light altereth,
And say "My master that was thrall to Love
Is become thrall to Death."
Bow down before him, ballad, sigh and groan.
But make no sojourn in thy outgoing;
For haply it may be
That when thy feet return at evening
Death shall come in with thee
Algernon Charles Swinburne "A Ballad of Death"
In June 2010 Christhopher Hitchens, well known author, journalist, debater, lecturer and general bon vivant woke up in a New York Hotel room and understood what it was to die.
He was in the middle of a sucessful book tour - selling his own autobiography, matter of fact, and had appearances scheduled that evening. Although north of sixty he certainly wasn't slowing down, and was writing, and I suspect conversing and drinking just as avidly as ever. Nevertheless he could barely summon enough strength to call for help and summon the paramedics who would take him to the hospital where the ever polite emergency room doctors would escort him from 'Wellville' to the land where people get to learn about the real meaning of words like 'suspicious mass' , 'metastatic' and 'chemoradiation'
In short, he had to confront his own mortality now that he had permanently been deported to 'tumorville' (I prefer 'Cancerworld', but the diary is about him, not me). And being Hitchens, he wrote about it, in a series of essays that have now been republished in a thin book called, so appropriately 'Mortality'. The front cover is black; the back cover has a picture of him looking wan and haggard and pained; and of course everyone knows by now that this is a posthumous book, the very word 'posthumous' coming from the Latin meaning 'last'.
In a way this slim volume reminds me of nothing so much as C.S Lewis's confrontation of grief "A Grief Observed' that he wrote after his wife died - also of cancer, naturally; if any insentient disease can be said to be cruel, this one can. It's cruelty can be breathtaking. In fact, here's a quote that has always sqeezed my heart a little, atheist though I am:
"“When you are happy, so happy you have no sense of needing Him, so happy that you are tempted to feel His claims upon you as an interruption, if you remember yourself and turn to Him with gratitude and praise, you will be — or so it feels— welcomed with open arms. But go to Him when your need is desperate, when all other help is vain, and what do you find? A door slammed in your face, and a sound of bolting and double bolting on the inside. After that, silence.”
Hitchens does not take quite that tone. Rather he stays polemical, true to his atheist nature, and thus those who read the book as unshakeable atheists will find things to gloat on, as usual; he is kind enough to quote from a religious website that openly rejoiced at his disease and seemed pleased at the prospect of eternal damnation waiting for him. Most other religious people were quite a bit kinder, happily; some offering to pray for him; some promising to not offend him by specifically not praying for him. He mentions Francis Crick who did bring something of substance; an offer to have his DNA sequenced (Crick is a well known believer who tries to reconcile his religious beliefs with his illustrius science career). Of course it is always fitting that someone with a disease that might potentially be helped one day by stem cells have something to say about 'Dickey-Wicker' which is the congressional amendment that forbids any federal funding of research that involves a human embryo. We all I think share some qualms about creating embryos for research (for the record, so did Hitchens), but there is perhaps no better way than raging against the dying of the light than fighting against this lethal sort of stupidity, which seems even more abundant in Republican controlled congress these days.
When Hitchens was a columnist for Vanity Fair he agreed with his editor that he would write about anything except sports. Consequently, Hitchens had a very well honed style for describing that which is new or outre or maybe even revealing in its banality, and the world of cancer treatment and its side effects and little surprises are discussed with clarity and vigor. Do you know that when you undergo hair destroying chemotherapy that even the hair on your nostrils falls out, and thus you walk around with a runny nose all day, like an ill child? That you can be hungry and yet fearful of the stupendous nausea that even the scent of food can bring on? That your libido goes away and you can lose sensation in your feet and fingertips? Alternating diarrhea and constipation? Hitchens spares us none of this, and plaintively says "It is not so much I am battling cancer; I have the feeling it is battling me " Also, the saying attributed to Nietsche, that "What doesn't kill me makes me stronger" comes in for some well deserved criticism, something which I as a war vet find particularly welcome. And by the way, I have had some experience in the mecca of tumortown treatment, the MD Anderson Cancer Center (Its many buildings and interconnected clinics rise from the streets of Houston like the Las Vegas Strip; some six different medical centers are intertwined there), and I can absolutely testify to the efficacy of their radiation treatments, the kindness, dedication and damn smartness of its workers, the overall air of absolute professionalism, and the side effects of radiation treatments that leave one barely able to walk. You get to ring a little bell when you finish your treatments, like some sort of naval graduation.
Of course, what does one say to those confronting mortality? And what do those unfortunate dwellers of tumortown say to those of their friends and family that have to shuttle between both worlds? Hitchens details one breathtakingly insensitive conversation he had with someone, and I have seen these sorts of dialogues play out with my own eyes. But he doesn't spare himself either, and seems particularly contemptuous of one Randy Pausch, a professor at Carnegie Mellon who forced a large audience to listen to his last lecture, because it was his last lecture; the man had terminal pancreatic cancer, and wrote a book on it. I mention this not to either criticise Pausch or Hitchens; we all have to deal with our own mortality in our own way. You can always ignore the books or walk out of the lecture. I only bring it up to state that maybe dwellers in both worlds should realize exactly who they are talking to when they do; I was always greatful to my uncle that when I talked to him several days before his death of metastatic prostate cancer, he never once mentioned it except in the context of how he was reasonably comfortable despite it.
Anyone dying before their time probably contemplates with a little bit of regret things that they never got around to doing, or couldn't do because there was no time. Reading Hitchens it is clear that his biggest hate figures were Bill Clinton, Henry Kissinger and Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, the odius pope Benedict XVI; rather varied lot that, but there it is. He expresses that in the case of the latter two, he would have liked to write their obituaries and do them the full obloquy, but alas, both figures have now outlived him. I am tempted to do the job for him in a future diary. And to get a flavor of what the obituary would be like, I refer readers to his piece on Pope Ratz here [warning it contains triggers] OK, I can't resist quoting a small piece:
The Roman Catholic Church is headed by a mediocre Bavarian bureaucrat once tasked with the concealment of the foulest iniquity, whose ineptitude in that job now shows him to us as a man personally and professionally responsible for enabling a filthy wave of crime. Ratzinger himself may be banal, but his whole career has the stench of evil—a clinging and systematic evil that is beyond the power of exorcism to dispel. What is needed is not medieval incantation but the application of justice—and speedily at that.
I might take issue with his term 'mediocre' - but so much the worse for his holiness. He certainly had the smarts to know better. And as for Kissinger, well, I think I can do no better than to embed this excerpt from Hitchens discussing this evil man shortly before he died
And, if interested, one can read his book "The trials of Henry Kissinger" which details his complicity in a series of alleged war crimes in Indochina, Bangladesh, Chile, Cyprus and East Timor (It was also made into a documentary). According to Hitchens, Kissinger deserves prosecution "for war crimes, for crimes against humanity, and for offenses against common or customary or international law, including conspiracy to commit murder, kidnap, and torture." He further calls him "a stupendous liar with a remarkable memory." Thanks, Christopher, that is exactly how I feel about Donald Rumsfeld, except I don't think his memory was as good as Kissinger's. Someone get cracking on that damn book.
What, one asks, would Hitchens have made of the current election? In a way, this is where I miss the man most (and now I suppose my true feelings emerge): It really is a thousand pities that we have not him to comment on the current state of political affairs; about the clown show that was the Republican nomination process - Hitchens would have detested every single one of them I do believe, similar to his feelings on the tea party. And I cannot think any differently that Mr Hitchens would have had anything but contempt for our current slippery eel of a person who is also the Republican nominee; yes for his Mormonism ( and the absolutely ludicrous tenets therein, at least how he would have seen them) but also for his artlessness, his phoniness,his lack of soul, and his utter lack of irony, always a mortal sin in the worldview of Hitchens or indeed in any of us who love literature.
But as we all know, we don't just confront our mortality, we experience it, and Hitchens has expereinced his, and those of us left behind - as those who survive loved ones when they die, have to carry on the best we can. In the case of the author, we at least have the words; no good to him; powerful good to us. And since I opened this rather grim diary with a passage from one of my favorite poets, Algernon Charles Swinburne, I shall close it with another; this from Philip Larkin's 'Aubade': (note the irony here; the title is from the French literature for a term for a morning poem, or one that greets the dawn; Larkin deliberately uses it for a poem that dwells on the opposite of dawn, the coming of night. That's real and meaningful irony, in case you were wondering).
This is a special way of being afraid
No trick dispels. Religion used to try,
That vast moth-eaten musical brocade
Created to pretend we never die,
And specious stuff that says No rational being
Can fear a thing it will not feel, not seeing
That this is what we fear—no sight, no sound,
No touch or taste or smell, nothing to think with,
Nothing to love or link with,
The anaesthetic from which none come round.