Vulture has an interview with Martin Amis, the prolific and brilliant son of novelist Kingsley Amis and the best friend of Christopher Hitchens. One small part of the interview was about Hitchens’ death and his own mourning process. It makes for an interesting read:
Do you want to talk some about Christopher Hitchens?
I’ve said before, it’s sort of paradoxical, the response to a death so close. Deaths that are a little further away you can process in the expected ways. You feel grief and shed tears. But this has been surprising and not at all all negative, either. That’s sort of disturbing as well.
I always used to bow to his love of life, and always thought it was superior to mine. But it seems that what happens when a friend that close—by which I mean that you grew up and grew along together, you got married about the same time, you got divorced about the same time, you had children, you had more children, all the crises were in parallel—when someone that’s as close as that goes, it’s as though they give you the job of loving life moment by moment. It’s your responsibility to inherit that love of life. I don’t know how long that’s going to last, but I certainly felt it for a good few months.
At the memorial service, it began with James Fenton reading the poem “For Andrew Wood.” What would our dead friends want of us, would they want us to go on being depressed about what we’d lost; the turning point of the poem says he thinks they would want us to grieve for what the dead have lost. You suddenly realize that death is going to be a multiple bereavement for you, not just for your friends and your family. They’ll lose you, but you’ll lose everyone, and it’s as if everything you loved, everyone loved is in a chartered airplane going down in flames and landing on your head. When I grieve for what he’s lost, that’s what I feel—deprived at a stroke from family, children, friends, and everything else that you value.
Has the grieving gotten easier?
It’s hard to make progress with grief. And I feel very stuck with him, in that every day I give a sort of groan or a shout of incredulity. I just can’t believe it. And I also think, it’s so radical of him to die, so contrarian, so left-wing, so extreme. And it was long in coming, too.
His long sickness, you mean?
His son asked me, has this put you off smoking? And I said, no, it’s put me off medical treatment. He was so determined and resolute about that—he tried all that there is to try. And in the last months, you’d be sitting with him in hospital, and every ten minutes someone came in and did something unspeakable do him—stuck something down his nose. And what killed him, in fact, was not the cancer, but the hospital. He had three or four bouts of hospital-borne pneumonia. It doesn’t work anymore, hospital. And they said, if you stay here, it’s not a question of if you’ll get another one, you will get another one. By that time you’re so weak and have such a deep sense of your own fragility that you don’t want to be anywhere else, because the minute you are, there’s an emergency that takes you back.
So I don’t think I’ve ever been particularly scared of death—but scared of dying, the process. It doesn’t seem to be a good way of doing it. There’s an Iris Murdoch novel where there’s a character who’s dying says, I do so want to die well, but how is it done? A good question. And Hitch certainly died well—without self-pity. And without loss of humor. Because it’s often been said that it’s very hard for a dying person not to be a villain. But he didn’t succumb to that. But, you know, getting pummeled by various treatments, unable to eat or drink—all tubes—for months before he died. I very much fear that I’ll be not a good advertisement for the process.
Not as good as he was.
Not a chance. He was very brave. Not just at the end. He was fearless. Often you’d be in—when we were younger, we’d be in ferocious pubs, for instance, and some altercation would begin, and you’d be saying, Hitch, let’s sort of slip away, and he wouldn’t back down an inch, ever. I never had that kind of physical courage. And it’s nice being brave. It’s a great resource. And he wasn’t daunted, as I’m sure I’d be. Maybe I’ll do it a little bit better, because of him, but I don’t like my chances of holding my head up.
The other great thing is that he never felt the least shame about it. I think people are much afflicted by shame when they’re dying. Especially in a culture like America, where there’s such pressure to be up and on top of things. I’m sure I’m going to feel ashamed—and sort of cower, cringe, and hide. He wasn’t a bit like that.
I can’t imagine I will handle death as well as Hitchens did either. I doubt many of us could.
4 comments
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Michael Heath
August 2, 2012 at 9:26 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
I lost my best friend in 1989 when I was twenty-nine. He was the same age and died in a horrendous car accident. I couldn’t have predicted how I’d react to his death, one doesn’t even think of death much at that age, in spite of my having lost another dear friend seven years earlier to a drunk driver.
My friend was the rare person who both loved people unconditionally and took on a diverse group of friends. I’ve found this to be a rare trait, I certainly don’t possess this quality in spite of greatly admiring it.
So for me, his death made me continuously cognizant of how fortunate I was to have his friendship, even twenty-three years later. His legacy and then death made me strident in [somewhat feebly] attempting to defend the ‘least among us’ given his legacy of befriending those who most needed a friend, even when they weren’t cool or physically attractive or all those other shallow attributes the young embrace, in spite of his being a very physically attractive person. His death also made me more aware of his qualities and pushed my associations more towards those with similar traits to his, like one of my grandmothers. He really did perceive possibilities in each person; how great is that?
cycleninja
August 2, 2012 at 10:14 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
I hate to dismiss this as “one bad apple,” but to say that the hospital was the problem is to disrespect and discount the countless people who HAVE gotten through this by modern medicine. Certainly this hospital (if it was only one) needs to figure out its sanitation processes, but Hitchens’ weakened immune system played a part, too.
wscott
August 2, 2012 at 10:48 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Few of us handle life as well as Hitchens did.
As for hospitals-as-killers: while grief makes Amis overstate his case, there is a kernal of truth in his point. I’ve had both of my parents in the hospital for extended stays recently. And while the care they recevied was generally good overall, there’s no denying the somewhat dehumanizing experience of having a complete stranger come in every 5-10 minutes and do “something unspeakable.” Staff shortages due to reduced budgets hasn’t helped. Then there’s the rise of staph infections and hospital-specific maladies. My grandfather used to say “I never go to the hospital; too many sick people there.”
bmiller
August 2, 2012 at 11:31 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
cycleninja:
I don’t think that this was the point of the comments, to disrespect people working in the hospital. No…the point is medical technology, especially for terminal cases, is so invasive, so painful, so terrible.
I have a friend and coworker suffering from leukemia who was killed, quickly and painfully, by the treatment, not the disease itself (which would have ultimately killed her, probably), so I can understand were he is coming from.
Myself…I am 49 years old. I am utterly cowardly and would never put myself through the heroic, gruesome technologies (at hundreds of thousands of dollars) that my friend went through. Never. Nor would I want intrusive, invasive medicine to “save” me if I had a stroke so I could live for nine years in a sub par nursing home (and they are all sub par). Not for me, thank you very much.