Now, ballad, gather poppies in thine hands
And sheaves of brier and many rusted sheaves
Rain-rotten in rank lands,
Waste marigold and late unhappy leaves
And grass that fades ere any of it be mown;
And when thy bosom is filled full thereof
Seek out Death's face ere the light altereth,
And say "My master that was thrall to Love
Is become thrall to Death."
Bow down before him, ballad, sigh and groan.
But make no sojourn in thy outgoing;
For haply it may be
That when thy feet return at evening
Death shall come in with thee
Algernon Charles Swinburne "A Ballad of Death"
In June 2010 Christhopher Hitchens, well known author, journalist, debater, lecturer and general bon vivant woke up in a New York Hotel room and understood what it was to die.
He was in the middle of a sucessful book tour - selling his own autobiography, matter of fact, and had appearances scheduled that evening. Although north of sixty he certainly wasn't slowing down, and was writing, and I suspect conversing and drinking just as avidly as ever. Nevertheless he could barely summon enough strength to call for help and summon the paramedics who would take him to the hospital where the ever polite emergency room doctors would escort him from 'Wellville' to the land where people get to learn about the real meaning of words like 'suspicious mass' , 'metastatic' and 'chemoradiation'
In short, he had to confront his own mortality now that he had permanently been deported to 'tumorville' (I prefer 'Cancerworld', but the diary is about him, not me). And being Hitchens, he wrote about it, in a series of essays that have now been republished in a thin book called, so appropriately 'Mortality'. The front cover is black; the back cover has a picture of him looking wan and haggard and pained; and of course everyone knows by now that this is a posthumous book, the very word 'posthumous' coming from the Latin meaning 'last'.