Before I was diagnosed with esophageal cancer a year and a half ago, I rather jauntily told the readers of my memoirs that when faced with extinction I wanted to be fully conscious and awake, in order to “do” death in the active and not the passive sense. And I do, still, try to nurture that little flame of curiosity and defiance: willing to play out the string to the end and wishing to be spared nothing that properly belongs to a life span. However, one thing that grave illness does is to make you examine familiar principles and seemingly reliable sayings. And there’s one that I find I am not saying with quite the same conviction as I once used to: In particular, I have slightly stopped issuing the announcement that “Whatever doesn’t kill me makes me stronger.”
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Christopher Hitchens
Essayist, critic and journalist
United Kingdom · 1949–2011
Arts and letters
About
British-American essayist, literary critic and polemicist, a columnist for Vanity Fair, The Atlantic and Slate and the author of God Is Not Great. Diagnosed with stage four oesophageal cancer in June 2010 while on tour for his memoir Hitch-22, he wrote a sequence of essays about his own dying for Vanity Fair until shortly before his death in December 2011; they were collected as Mortality.
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