In the summer of 2010 the popular author and atheist Christopher Hitchens was diagnosed with cancer. With his usual candor and clarity, Hitchens movingly described his battle with the illness in an article he wrote for Vanity Fair.

I am badly oppressed by a gnawing sense of waste. I had real plans for my next decade and felt I'd worked hard enough to earn it. Will I really not live to see my children married? To watch the World Trade Center rise again?. … To the dumb question "Why me?" the cosmos barely bothers to return the reply: Why not?

I sometimes wish I were suffering in a good cause, or risking my life for the good of others, instead of just being a gravely endangered patient. Allow me to inform you, though, that when you sit in a room with a set of other finalists, and kindly people bring a huge transparent bag of poison to plant into your arm [his chemotherapy treatment] and you either read or don't read a book while the venom sack gradually empties into your system … . You feel swamped with passivity and impotence: dissolving in powerlessness like a sugar lump in water.