On 8 June 2010, Hitchens was on tour in New York promoting his memoirs Hitch-22 when he was taken into emergency care suffering from a severe pericardial effusion. Soon after, he announced he was postponing his tour to undergo treatment for oesophageal cancer.
In a Vanity Fair piece published in 2010, titled “Topic of Cancer”, he stated that he was undergoing treatment for cancer. He said that he recognised the long-term prognosis was far from positive and he would be a “very lucky person to live another five years.” A heavy smoker and drinker since his teenage years, Hitchens acknowledged that these habits were likely to have contributed to his illness. During his illness, Hitchens was under the care of Francis Collins and was the subject of Collins’s new cancer treatment, which maps out the human genome and selectively targets damaged DNA.
According to Christopher Buckley, before Hitchens died, his estranged friend Sidney Blumenthal wrote to Hitchens. Buckley said the letter contained words of “tenderness and comfort and implicit forgiveness.”
Hitchens died of pneumonia on 15 December 2011 in the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, Houston, aged 62.
According to Andrew Sullivan, his last words were “Capitalism. Downfall.”
In accordance with his wishes, his body was donated to medical research. Mortality, a collection of seven of Hitchens’s Vanity Fair essays about his illness, was published posthumously in September 2012.
Bron: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Hitchens#Illness_and_death
Imaan Booster 