One thing he noticed was that the subject of death makes people awkward because many people prefer to avoid thinking about it. If you should read this in time, by all means keep in mind that September 20, 2010, has already been designated “Everybody Pray for Hitchens Day.

His life, rather than his career, was reading and writing, two of the only things at which he claimed he was any good. It's highly addictive to get core insights on personally relevant topics without repetition or triviality. In the war against Thanatos, if we must term it a war, the immediate loss of Eros is a huge initial sacrifice. 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.He never asked himself if he was wrong to be an atheist or if he should make a last-minute profession of faith.

During the US book tour for his memoir, Hitch-22, Christopher Hitchens collapsed in his New York hotel room to excruciating pain in his chest and thorax.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. He has been a debating partner of mine, as have several Protestant evangelical conservatives like Pastor Douglas Wilson of the New Saint Andrews College and Larry Taunton of the Fixed Point Foundation in Birmingham, Alabama.

Another positive review came from the magazine where Hitchens started his career, The New Statesman. 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".Once a person is diagnosed with cancer, his only hope of survival is to get quality treatment, and fast. 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.