I’m not sure how this book got onto my radar, but it’s another one that has been on my reading list for a while, so I decided to bring it with me on vacation. Pretty light stuff for the beach. Anyways, it consists of seven essays that Hitchens wrote and published in Vanity Fair, then it was collected into a book after he died. I didn’t really know the author’s work all that well, but I thought this was a great collection of thoughts on dying.
Hitchens was diagnosed with esophageal cancer and writes a lot about his treatment and his feelings as he goes through this, but he also talks about how people treat him. From what I gather he was very outspoken about the failures of religion and he writes about what it’s like for people to pray for him as an atheist and just how weird that is. He also writes about how his voice started to disappear as a result of the treatment and how unfortunate that was for him as a communicator. There was a section where he talks about how he doesn’t “have” a body, he “is” a body and how easy it is to forget that when you’re healthy.
To be honest, I thought this was a very refreshing take on
death. I’ve read so much stuff about death from the point of view of a
physician and whatnot that I appreciated getting the perspective from a
patient. Particularly a patient who clearly knows his craft and is good at
writing. It makes for a much more relatable experience for me as a reader who
is not a physician, plus I just feel that the market is saturated with doctors
trying to share their thoughts about the whole death thing. So it was a quick read,
kinda depressing, but I quite enjoyed it.
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