Faced with death, Christopher Hitchens (April 13, 1949 – December 15, 2011), a devout nonbeliever with a knack for dispensing well-rationed thinking in the name of freedom, decided to write about it.

Hitchens' Mortality was published posthumously. The essays and mental scratchings make Hitchens not only the journalist observing the event of death but also, in body and spirit, the actual event of death itself.   I don't focus on Hitchens' response to atheists who wished him well or to theists who demanded he account for the fact that he got cancer of the esophagus, the instrument he used to proclaim his atheism. I don't believe a debate is to be won over theology. Rest assured, however, about a fourth of the book is about the hypocrisy of religion.

When I described the tumor in my esophagus as a 'blind, emotionless alien,' I suppose that even I couldn't help awarding it some of the qualities of a living thing. This at least I know to be a mistake: an instance of the pathetic fallacy (angry cloud, proud mountain, presumptuous little Beaujolais) by which we ascribe animate qualities to inanimate phenomena. To exist, a cancer needs to be a living organism, but it cannot ever become a living organism.

"My heart is fragile," writes embroidery artist Julie Campbell of her work. It feels too much, aches, cries, and has touched the icy claws of fear, and yet I would prefer to handle all of this than have a cold heart lacking all empathy."

Hitchens struggles to maintain a public presence—how to have cancer in front of people. His body fails him, and thus, that is what invites comments. He comically but aptly calls for a book on cancer etiquette.  I couldn't agree more. Our basic social engagement skills neglect nuances. I hate small talk for the reason that it diminishes the individual. But deep-talk without empathy or insight can be far more devastating. As Hitchens learned.  
The limitations of communications are not rooted in phrases or words but, rather, in topics. Death, malady, and suffering (perceived or real) those things are horrible, sure, but that doesn't mean they be treated with neglect, shame, or, worse, false sentiment. I believe the more comfortable we are with our own difficult things, the better we receive them in others.  
Read more on our communication of illness and the limitations of language in Susan Sontag's Illness as Metaphor

It made me wonder if perhaps there was room for a shorthand book on cancer etiquette. This would apply to sufferers as well as to sympathizers. After all, I have hardly been reticent about my own malady. But nor do I walk around sporting a huge lapel button that reads, ASK ME ABOUT STAGE FOUR METASTASIZED ESOPHAGEAL CANCER, AND ONLY ABOUT THAT. In truth, if you can't bring me news about that and that alone, and about what happens when lymph nodes and lungs may be involved, I am not all that interested or that knowledgeable. One almost develops a kind of elitism about the uniqueness of one's own personal disorder.

Morality, more than anything, knocks on the limits of consciousness. A part of Hitchens is apart, looking at the cancer, knowing it exists, and managing its care. And then, there is a body that is being affected by cancer. Then, there is the cancer, which is part of the body and alive but not living. The mind/body/cancer co-dependence and disunity are fundamental to Mortality's narrative and Hitchens' understanding of what is happening to him.

Many have wondered where they exist when they die. Vladimir Nabokov thought we stepped through a wall of darkness. Jorge Luis Borges thought it was nothing. Simply nothing. Susan Sontag didn't seem to know but fretted quite a bit about existential annihilation.

Christopher Hitchens didn't know either. I've written about where we exist when we die, but it's about where we exist to the living. Not to our dead self. Because there is no such thing.   Joan Didion realized, after losing both her daughter and husband in an extremely unexpected way, that it isn't even about where the dead exist, it is about leaving them there, moving on alive. She writes in The Year of Magical Thinking "If we are to live ourselves there comes a point at which we must relinquish the dead, let them go, keep them dead."

My chief consolation in this year of living dyingly has been the presence of friends. I can't eat or drink for pleasure anymore, so when they offer to come, it's only for the blessed chance to talk. Some of these comrades can easily fill a hall with paying customers avid to hear them: They are talkers with whom it's a privilege just to keep up.

Hitchens lost his voice and his ability to speak, not his mind or expression.

Mortality concludes with lines scribbled without narrative but still in theme. Mortality. Hitchens reminds himself to review Wislawa Szymborska's poetry about the body's memory of pain, and he ends on a passage from Alan Lightman's 1993 novel, Einstein's Dreams, which essentially says that we must die to make room for those to come:   I explore a similar theme in Things We Cannot Abandon, the ways in which we hold on to things because we want to hold on to life, to always be alive.

With infinite life comes an infinite list of relatives. Grandparents never die, nor do great-grandparents, great-aunts ... and so on […]. Sons never escape from the shadows of their fathers. […] No one ever comes into his own […]. Such is the cost of immortality. No person is whole. No person is free.
From Alan Lightman's Einstein's Dreams

Mortality bestows freedom upon others. Freedom. There was nothing Hitchens believed in more.

One of my favorite books, Personal Memoirs of U.S. Grant, which Grant wrote until the week he died, is full of humility and grace, as is Oliver Sack's Gratitude, which also looks back fondly at life lived. And, of course, Maya Angelou's last work, Letters to My Daughter, a warm, generous extension of self. And Mary Oliver's last collection of essays, Upstream, is about finding and stepping into the eternal.