I read the news of his death just minutes after NPR posted it on their Facebook feed. I burst into tears; my heart felt as broken as if he had been a lifelong friend. I attribute this to the regularity with which I read his work. His byline appeared just weeks before his death, and his bylines gave me a false sense of security regarding his health. Surely someone so ill wouldn't be capable of writing the pieces he was writing. Just the weekend before his death, my mom and I poured over his most recent piece about Nietzsche, where he took to task the idea, "That which doesn't kill you makes you stronger."
But what makes my heart heavy is the specter of Hitchens in his last days. He looks so much like my father did in his last days that it makes me dizzy with grief. The excessively thin frame; the sunken eyes; the sallow skin; the bald head. There is a uniformity of appearance there that one can identify immediately as belonging to someone with cancer. So I grieve(d) not just for what we lost when he died (a magnificent writer and thinker; a contrarian; an occasional blowhard whose bloviations I enjoyed), but for the memory of my own father's death from cancer, and for the fight my mother currently wages.
