From inspirational autobiographical recounts and reflective personal essays, to perception-shifting fiction; we’ve curated seven of the most moving, insightful and uplifting books on grief, loss and mortality. Although we all prefer to use only the good passport, sooner or later each of us is obliged, at least for a spell, to identify ourselves as citizens of that other place.

But irony is my business and I just can’t see any ironies here: Would it be less poignant to get cancer on the day that my memoirs were remaindered as a box-​office turkey, or that I was bounced from a coach-​class flight and left on the tarmac? Over the course of his treatment, Hitchens had the opportunity to enter an experimental new therapy program that had the possibility to cure him. This is a distinctly bizarre way of “living”—lawyers in the morning and doctors in the afternoon—and means that one has to exist even more than usual in a double frame of mind.Of the astonishing and flattering number of people who wrote to me when I fell so ill, very few failed to say one of two things. So there are some quite reputable Catholics, Jews, and Protestants who think that I might in some sense of the word be worth saving. I was especially struck by the conviction of a man who was a staunch atheist unflinchingly prepared for a godless death. But, as I knew before I became ill, there are some people for whom this explanation is unsatisfying. If anything, he felt that doing so would likely make him a shallow and insincere person on a number of levels.

During the US book tour for his memoir, Hitch-22, Christopher Hitchens collapsed in his New York hotel room to excoriating pain in his chest and thorax. Some of his friends didn’t know what to say, other than recounting “motivational” stories of people who had survived the disease. The true struggle of his last writings is to remain himself, deep in the country of the ill, for as long as he can. Working back from the cancer-ridden squamous cells that these first results disclosed, it took rather longer than that to discover the disagreeable truth.By completing your purchase, you agree to Audible's Conditions of Use and authorise Audible to charge your designated card or any other card on file. Some of his friends tried to stay relentlessly positive; they didn’t know what to say, so they tried to tell him motivational stories about people who had beaten cancer. You’ll explore what it feels like to be confronted with one’s mortality, how to handle severe pain and how cancer affects the body and mind. Like virtually everything he wrote over his long, distinguished career, diamond-hard and brilliant .