"Mortality" and "Tumorville"

“I have more than once in my time woken up feeling like death.”

Though hearing this from a passing person, one might believe that this is an over dramatic statement. That to feel like death is something no one can say they have felt;not while living. But Hitchen’s explores, in his personal memoir Mortality, the feeling of dying. Not the last moment of breath, but the long and drawn out experience of death taking over your body.

A Very dark read Hitchens does not sugar coat the feeling of waking up and not being able to live, to get up, to move, to breath is all too much. He does not lighten the subject of death but shows us what he went through and his, possibly unorthodox, way of dealing with it. He familiarizes the reader with the stage theory of Elisabeth Kubler-Ross which is the process of moving from denial to anger to depression and acceptance. A common theory amongst grievers and often a simplified way of dealing with one's heavy emotions. Hitchens tells the reader how he did not go through these stages as one would when dealing with the grief of cancer- but that he was in denial for most of it and skipped over anger because he did not feel it would do him good.  He talks about how he dealt with his cancer by not dealing with it, he did not stop his work, but did 2 shows in one night, “This is what citizens of sick country do while they are still hopelessly clinging to their old domicile.” He felt as though he waded in a stage of oppression, “Instead, I am badly oppressed by the gnawing sense of waste”. He is only bothered by the fact that he is a life wasted. His dissonance is felt by the reader as he talks about the life he had planned to have.

Another source of discomfort for the reader is the lasting comparison throughout of cancer and the sick being “citizens” of their own country. That they are in a world all their own. He calls it “Tumorville” in once sentence. They have a language their own, their own culture and ways.  He shows the reader that unless you have been through cancer, or another life threatening series of sickness, it is a country you’ve never visited-you can never know what it is truly like.

Hitchens ends this stretch of Mortality with a truly upsetting question and answer. It is often shown that when someone has a terminal disease they ask “Why me?” Hitchens call thinks this is pointless, “To the dumb question ‘Why me?’ the cosmos barely bothers to return the reply; Why not?” It is painfully true to many, that there is no rhyme or reason why they get sick, the world just allows it.


Hitchens, Christopher. "Excerpt." Mortality. New York: Twelve, 2012. N. pag.Twelve/Hachette Book Group. Web. 18 Oct. 2016