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"I came to consciousness feeling as if I were actually shackled to my own corpse."

Christopher Hitchens writes about crossing the border from well to sick.

It happened the morning after this appearance on "The Daily Show," when he was still in denial:

I would not cancel these appearances or let down my friends or miss the chance of selling a stack of books. I managed to pull off both gigs without anyone noticing anything amiss, though I did vomit two times, with an extraordinary combination of accuracy, neatness, violence, and profusion, just before each show. This is what citizens of the sick country do while they are still hopelessly clinging to their old domicile.

In "the land of malady," where he now finds himself...

Everybody smiles encouragingly and there appears to be absolutely no racism. A generally egalitarian spirit prevails, and those who run the place have obviously got where they are on merit and hard work.... [T]here seems to be almost no talk of sex, and the cuisine is the worst of any destination I have ever visited.....

He wonders whether the famous Kübler-Ross stages of dying are appropriate for him, given the way he's lived:

... I can?t see myself smiting my brow with shock or hear myself whining about how it?s all so unfair: I have been taunting the Reaper into taking a free scythe in my direction and have now succumbed to something so predictable and banal that it bores even me. Rage would be beside the point for the same reason. Instead, I am badly oppressed by a gnawing sense of waste. I had real plans for my next decade and felt I?d worked hard enough to earn it. Will I really not live to see my children married? To watch the World Trade Center rise again? To read?if not indeed write?the obituaries of elderly villains like Henry Kissinger and Joseph Ratzinger? But I understand this sort of non-thinking for what it is: sentimentality and self-pity. 

To Hitch, "Why me?" is a "dumb question." "Why not?" ? he quips.

Full post as published by Althouse on August 04, 2010 (boomark / email).