The sad, but not unexpected news of the death of Christopher Hitchens reached me late last night.
Though it felt a clichéd gesture, I couldn’t help but pour a little single malt scotch into a rocks glass in his honor before turning in.1 Today, the obituaries and personal eulogies begin to try to explain just who Hitchens really was — just as the remembrances of Steve Jobs attempted to do only a few short months ago. Hitchens sometimes took positions that felt strange or even hypocritical to me, but almost everyone I know would at least offer a toast to the style and aplomb with which he expressed himself.
As one of my friends put it — You didn’t always like him, but you always read him.
Shortly before he died, Hitchens wrote an essay which challenged the notion of “That which does not kill us makes us stronger”. At any point in his career, he could make short work of platitudes like these but, when accompanied by a photograph taken of him in the final stages of the esophageal cancer which ultimately claimed his life, his words took on an added weight which all but obliterated any possible counter-argument.
Now if you’ve ever had a front row seat to “The Cancer Show”, you knew that this was exactly the kind of falsely-sentimental thing about the disease that Hitch would enjoy laying waste to — and lay waste he did. But after I had finished reading it, I found myself considering a reformulation of the very idea that Hitch had just destroyed:
Who are we once we’ve been stripped of everything we call “us”?
***
Seeing someone you know face a serious illness feels like watching someone trying to outrun a flaming meteor which is hurdling towards them at incredible speed.
On the day of their diagnosis, a small shadow appears over them. Once they grasp the idea that this thing — their mortality — is heading straight for them, they start to run like hell. They begin to throw off anything which might encumber them or slow them down. Money, status, sex, what people think of us — none of that is really on your mind when you’re running for your life, right?
If they’re lucky, they will get out from under that rock and back into the sunshine. If not, the shadow grows larger and darker until it finally consumes them.
And as an outsider, all you can really do is watch it happen.
My father, John Lancy, died of a brain tumor ten years ago. It was an especially aggressive variety which took his life only a little more than a year after his diagnosis. Like Steve Jobs, he was only 56 years old when he died.
It sounds more sudden than it was when I write it that way. Because as many people who’ve seen cancer up-close will tell you, the process itself feels slow and is, in fact, incredibly boring. It is day after day of drudgery — punctuated by moments of gut-wrenching anxiety: All of the tests, the drawing of blood, all of the appointments, the infections, the blood clots, the sleepless nights, the ambulance rides. The interminable hours spent in hospital waiting rooms, filling out forms. That faint, humming sound from the bank of fluorescent lights overhead as you sit in a plastic chair by a hospital bed and wonder to yourself “Is this the last day we get?”. It all combines into a weird whirlpool of emotion and exhaustion, a shade of Yeats’s “widening gyre” where the center cannot hold.
It is death by incremental indignity.
In the years since my father’s death, I’ve tried to write about that experience a number of times without any success. It’s too big a thing to put my arms around, it seems. But let me try to grab hold of this one part of it, at least — the part that I thought of when I heard the news about both Jobs and Hitchens.
Many of Hitch’s obituaries included this quote from a June 2011 piece in Vanity Fair: “My chief consolation in this year of living dyingly has been the presence of friends”. It seems to me that the obverse might also be true, that the friends and loved ones of the dying can find strength in watching how the people we love and admire choose to meet their deaths.
What do we do when we know we can’t outrun our shadow?
“That which does not kill you makes you stronger” may be nothing more than an empty slogan, but maybe the process of dying can reveal something elemental about us.
***
Illness often gradually strips us of the things we use to identify ourselves: The way we look, our ability to work, to have influence, to walk around freely, to speak, to see, to make love. It is a slow surrender to the world around you and, in the end, to a process that no one can control.
If you’ve ever seen the movie “The Lion in Winter”, you probably remember when Prince Geoffrey scolds Prince Richard for refusing to beg before King Henry II:
“You fool”, says Geoffrey, “As if it matters how a man falls.“
“When the fall is all that’s left, it matters.“, replies Richard.
Watching someone make their last stand — not in some metaphorical way, but for real — is an awe-inspiring thing and to remain yourself in the face of certain extinction is an authentic act of courage. I’ve read that in Steve Jobs’s last days, he tried to do everything he could for the people he loved and, true to form, maybe also push a product or two over the finish line. Christopher Buckley says that Hitchens, up until just a few days ago, was marking up his copy of P.G. Wodehouse’s letters. He apparently spent many of his last days surrounded by friends and family, talking, reading, and writing as much as he was able to.
In his last days, my father found ways to be kind and gracious even when he was in incredible pain. He laughed at his shaky penmanship, but he kept writing. When the tumor began to take his eyesight, he’d ask me to sit in his blind-spot so that the room would be “better looking to him”. He did his best to make us laugh even in the darkest moments, to be cheerful, to protect us from the fear he certainly felt of what was to come.
Not coincidently, these were the also things that he loved to do when he was healthy. It’s who John Lancy was. The poise he showed in attempting to remain himself in the face of diminishment and death is the finest example of bravery that I’ve ever seen with my own eyes. It may well be the best thing my dad ever gave me.
It seems a simple proposition — “Hold on to the best parts of who you are”. But as far as virtues go, it’s a difficult thing to achieve in practice, even in the best circumstances. Having seen firsthand what it takes to do so under the worst of circumstances, I can tell you with certainty that there’s nothing simple about it.
So the next time you find yourself with a glass in hand, I suggest you raise it to Hitch, to Jobs, to my Dad — or to anyone else whose life has helped to light the way for you. They all represent a great, quintessentially human value:
No matter how dark the night, sometimes you can still find a way to shine through it.
- It may have been more than a little [↩]
