AC360 interview with Christopher Hitchens

• Burned the candle at both ends “and it gave a lovely light.”
• Frustrating to die of the same thing as a family member “you don’t feel any filial piety about the disease that killed your father.”
• Most careful study on prayer (Study of the Therapeutic Effects of intercessionary prayer)
  • No correlation between prayer and improvement.
  • Some believers feel bad when they fail to improve, feeling they’ve let down those who prayed for them.
• mother’s suicide
  • suicide pact with her lover
  • had tried calling him multiple times the night she killed herself
  • the concept of closure is ridiculous “it wouldn’t be worth having” “what it would mean is some quite important part of you had gone numb–you could think, “oh, how nice, I don’t feel anything about her anymore.””
• “I have been “in denial” for some time, knowingly burning the candle at both ends and finding that it often gives a lovely light. But for precisely that reason, 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.”
  • Chemo is boring; can’t do anything. “You don’t feel great and you’re watching poison go into your arm. People saying you should be struggling, battling cancer. You’re not battling. You couldn’t be living a more passive moment than that. You feel as if you’re drowning in powerlessness.”