Mortality (10 page)
Christopher’s charisma never left him, not in any realm: not in public, not in private, not even in the hospital. He made a party of it, transforming the sterile, chilly, neon-lighted, humming and beeping and blinking room into a study and a salon. His artful conversation never ceased.
The constant interruptions: The poking and prodding, the sample taking, the breathing treatments, the IV bags being changed—nothing kept him from holding court, making a point or an argument or hitting a punchline for his “guests.” He listened and drew us out, and had us all laughing. He was always asking for and commenting on another newspaper, another magazine, another novel, another review copy. We stood around his bed and reclined on plastic upholstered chairs as he made us into participants in his Socratic discourses.
One night he was coughing up blood and was wheeled into the ICU for a hastily scheduled bronchoscopy. I alternated between watching over him and sleeping in a convertible chair. We lay side by side in our single beds. At one point we both woke up and started burbling like children at a sleepover party. At the time, this was the best it was going to get.
When he came to following the bronchoscopy, after the doctor told him the trouble in his windpipe was not cancer but rather pneumonia, he was still intubated but avidly scribbling notes and questions about every conceivable subject. I saved the pages of paper on which he wrote his side of the conversation. There are sweet-nothings and a picture he drew on the top of the first page and then:
Pneumonia? What type?
Am I cancer free?
Pain is hard to remember, right now, 4 to 5.
He asked after the children, and my father.
How’s Edwin? Tell him I asked.
I worry about him
’Cos I love him.
I want to hear him.
Slightly down the page he wrote what he wanted me to bring him from our guesthouse in Houston:
Nietzsche, Mencken and Chesterton books. Plus all random
bits paper…Maybe in one hold-all bag. Look in the
drawers! Bedside, etc. Up and downstairs.
That night a dear family friend arrived from New York and was in the room when, in one of his nocturnal interludes of wakefulness and energy Christopher flashed an open, wide smile around the tube still running down his throat and wrote on his clipboard:
I’m staying here
[in Houston]
until I’m cured. And then
I’m taking our families on a vacation to Bermuda.
The next morning, after they took the tube out, I came into his room to find him smiling his foxlike grin at me.
“Happy anniversary!” he called out.
A nurse came in with a small white cake, paper plates and plastic forks.…
Another wedding anniversary: We are reading the newspaper on the terrace in our suite in a New York hotel. It is a faultless fall day. Our two-year-old daughter is sitting contentedly beside us, drinking a bottle. She climbs off her chair and squats down, inspecting something on the ground. She pulls the bottle out of her mouth, calls to me and points to a large, motionless bumble bee. She is alarmed, shaking her head back and forth, as if to say “No, no, no!”
“The bee stopped,” she says. Then she makes a command: “Make it start.”
Back then she believed I had the power to reanimate the dead. I don’t recall what I said to her about the bee. What I do recall are the words “Make it start.” Christopher then lifted her into his lap and consoled and distracted her with a change of subject and humor. Just as he would, with all of his children, so many years later, when he was ill.
I miss his perfect voice. I heard it day and night, night and day. I miss the first happy trills when he woke; the low octaves of “his morning voice” as he read me snippets from the newspaper that outraged or amused him; the delighted and irritated (mostly irritated) registers as I interrupted him while he read; the jazz-tone riffs of him “talking down the line” to a radio station from the kitchen phone as he cooked lunch; his chirping, high-note greeting when our daughter came home from school; and his last soothing, pianissimo chatterings on retiring late at night.
I miss, as his readers must, his writer’s voice, his voice on the page. I miss the unpublished Hitch: the countless notes he left for me in the entryway, on my pillow, the emails he would send while we sat in different rooms in our apartment or in our place in California and the emails he sent when he was on the road. And I miss his handwritten communiques: his innumerable letters and postcards (we date back to the time of the epistle) and his faxes, the thrill of receiving Christopher’s instant dispatches as he checked-in from a dicey spot on some other continent.
The first time Christopher went public and wrote about his illness for
Vanity Fair,
he was ambivalent about it. He was intent on protecting our family’s privacy. He was living the topic and he didn’t want it to become all-encompassing, he didn’t want to be defined by it. He wanted to think and write in a sphere apart from sickness. He had made a pact with his editor and chum, Graydon Carter, that he would write about anything except sports, and he kept that promise. He had often put himself in the frame, but now he was the ultimate subject of the story.
His last words of the unfinished fragmentary jottings at the end of this little book may seem to trail off, but in fact they were written on his computer in bursts of energy and enthusiasm as he sat in the hospital using his food tray for a desk.
When he was admitted to the hospital for the last time, we thought it would be for a brief stay. He thought—we all thought—he’d have the chance to write the longer book that was forming in his mind. His intellectual curiosity was sparked by genomics and the cutting-edge proton radiation treatments he underwent, and he was encouraged by the prospect that his case could contribute to future medical breakthroughs. He told an editor friend waiting for an article, “Sorry for the delay, I’ll be back home soon.” He told me he couldn’t wait to catch up on all the movies he had missed and to see the King Tut exhibition in Houston, our temporary residence.
The end was unexpected.
At home in Washington, I pull books off the shelves, out of the book towers on the floor, off the stacks of volumes on tables. Inside the back covers are notes written in his hand that he took for reviews and for himself. Piles of his papers and notes lie on surfaces all around the apartment, some of which were taken from his suitcase that I brought back from Houston. At any time I can peruse our library or his notes and rediscover and recover him.
When I do, I hear him, and he has the last word. Time after time, Christopher has the last word.
June 2012
Washington, D.C.
C
HRISTOPHER
H
ITCHENS
was born April 13, 1949, in England and graduated from Balliol College at Oxford University. The father of three children, he was the author of more than twenty books and pamphlets, including collections of essays, criticism, and reportage. His book
God Is Not Great: How Religon
Poisons Everything
was a finalist for the 2007 National Book Award and an international bestseller. His best-selling memoir,
Hitch–
22
, was a finalist for the 2010 National Book Critics Circle Award for autobiography. His 2011 bestselling omnibus of selected essays,
Arguably
, was named by the
New York Times
as one of the ten best books of the year. A visiting professor of liberal studies at the New School in New York City, he was also the I. F. Stone professor at the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley. He was a columnist, literary critic, and contributing editor at
Vanity Fair
, the
Atlantic
,
Slate
, the
Times Literary Supplement
, the
Nation
, the
New Statesman
,
World Affairs
, and
Free Inquiry
, among other publications. He died in Houston on December 15, 2011.
Composed in Janson MT, a seventeenth-century serif typeface revived in the 1930s by Chauncey H. Griffith; and Requiem Text, a typeface designed by Jonathan Hoefler in 1992 based on inscriptional capitals dating from the 1530s.