Death, Explained

Christopher Hitchens’ Mortality: A rare honest book about death.
By Katie Roiphe

Before being diagnosed with esophageal cancer, Christopher Hitchens wrote in his memoir, Hitch-22, “I want to stare death in the eye.”

This seems, of course, an impossible blustery task, but in his last book, Mortality he comes astonishingly close to pulling it off.


Read more http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/roiphe/2012/08/christopher_hitchens_mortality_an_honest_book_about_death_.html

Trial of the Will

Vanity Fair | January 2012
By Christopher Hitchens

When it came to it, and old Kingsley suffered from a demoralizing and disorienting fall, he did take to his bed and eventually turned his face to the wall. It wasn’t all reclining and waiting for hospital room service after that—“Kill me, you fucking fool!” he once alarmingly exclaimed to his son Philip—but essentially he waited passively for the end. It duly came, without much fuss and with no charge.
Read more.