You feel swamped with passivity and impotence: dissolving in powerlessness like a sugar lump in water. Mortality and Imagination is a history of the literary ‘life’ of the dead — in their narrative, aesthetic, and ideological formulation — a theme which up to now has been explored only fragmentarily, available only in studies of particular genres. I sympathize afresh with the mighty Voltaire, who, when badgered on his deathbed and urged to renounce the devil, murmured that this was no time to be making enemies.

Fifty years on we look at them with the godly knowledge of how they turne dout after all - who they married, the date of their death - with no thought for who will one day be holding photographs of us. Who else feels Christopher Hitchens getting terminal throat cancer [sic] was God’s revenge for him using his voice to blaspheme Him? vivid, heart-wrenching and haunting - messages in a bottle tossed from the deck of a sinking ship as its captain, reeling in agony and fighting through the fog of morphine, struggles to keep his engines going . If anything, he felt that doing so would likely make him a shallow and insincere person on a number of levels.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. There have been many books on the medieval culture of death, but this book is the first devoted to the use and representation of the dead in English medieval writing. The religious prayed for him, even designating September 20, 2010, as ‘Everybody Pray for Hitchens Day’.

When he was diagnosed with cancer, Hitchens saw how uncomfortable people are with the idea of death. A member from these flocks remark that his cancer is well-deserved, that it was God’s revenge on him for using his voice to ridicule against monotheistic Religion. Of course my book hit the bestseller list on the day that I received the grimmest of news bulletins, and for that matter the last flight I took as a healthy-​feeling person (to a fine, big audience at the Chicago Book Fair) was the one that made me a million-​miler on United Airlines, with a lifetime of free upgrades to look forward to. Hitchens's powerful voice compels us to consider carefully the small measures by which we live every day and to cherish them. In this riveting account of his affliction, Hitchens poignantly describes the torments of illness, discusses its taboos, and explores how disease transforms experience and changes our relationship to the world around us.His life, rather than his career, was reading and writing, two of the only things at which he claimed he was any good. On June 8, 2010, several days after the memoir was published, he awoke in his New York hotel room “feeling as if I were actually shackled to my own corpse. Mortality, the final book by Christopher Hitchens, the Anglo-American essayist, reporter, devout atheist and all-around intellectual troublemaker, won't be shelved in the travel section.

In this beautifully written book of essays, Dr Oliver Sacks reflects with gratitude on his long, adventurous life, following a diagnosis of terminal cancer. It’s even in obituaries for cancer losers, as if one might reasonably say of someone that they died after a long and brave struggle with mortality. As against that, the humor is a touch feeble and repetitive, there seems to be almost no talk of sex, and the cuisine is the worst of any destination I have ever visited. Sunday Times 2012 Books of The Year Mail on Sunday's 2012 Books of The Year Independent's 2012 Books of The Year The Times 2012 Books of The Year During the US book tour for his memoir, Hitch-22, Christopher Hitchens collapsed in his New York hotel room to excoriating pain in his chest and thorax. He was especially proud of his commitment to atheism when he saw how much religion hindered medical advancements.In one way, I suppose, I have been “in denial” for some time, knowingly burning the candle at both ends and finding that it often gives a lovely light. The country has a language of its own—a lingua franca that manages to be both dull and difficult and that contains names like ondansetron, for anti-​nausea medication—as well as some unsettling gestures that require a bit of getting used to. Here, in pieces published in Vanity Fair to which are added rough notes and apothegms left behind in manuscript, Hitchens gives the strongest possible sense of his exhausting battle against the aggressive cancer spreading through his body. Estranged from his family and with only his cat Cabbage for company, our narrator is shocked to find out he has only months to live.

But on the side of my continued life is a group of brilliant and selfless physicians plus an astonishing number of prayer groups. It is, however, sobering and grief-inducing to read this brave and harrowing account of his 'year of living dyingly' in the grip of an alien that succeeded where none of his debate opponents had in bringing him down. One thing he noticed was that the subject of death makes people awkward because many people prefer to avoid thinking about it. The most comprehensive investigation of the subject ever conducted—the “Study of the Therapeutic Effects of Intercessory Prayer,” of 2006, could find no correlation at all between the number and regularity of prayers offered and the likelihood that the person being prayed for would have improved chances.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. So those who want me to die in agony are really praying that the efforts of our most selfless Christian physician be thwarted. In the war against Thanatos, if we must term it a war, the immediate loss of Eros is a huge initial sacrifice. Yet we also know that this gift is given to us for a limited period – we grow up, we grow older and eventually, we die.