TONY JONES, PRESENTER: Nearly two years ago I travelled to Washington to interview author, journalist and public intellectual Christopher Hitchens. He was looking death in the eye, having just been diagnosed with stage four cancer of the oesophagus. He had just had, as he put it, another "kill-or-cure dose of venom cocktail" mainlined into his veins. He was weak, he was sick and he was confronting the idea of his own mortality

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS, AUTHOR & JOURNALIST: We can't say any more than we can say there is no god, there is no after-life. We can only say there is no persuasive evidence for or argument for it. I like surprises. If there's to be a second look around with somehow not me and not my brain, but some kind of consciousness, well, that would be more fascinating than many days I've spent in real life.

TONY JONES: I'd like to ask you what you think about Martin Amis' idea that writers like you must actually believe in some life after death because not all of you, not all of the parts of you are going to die because the printed words you leave behind constitute a form of immortality.

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS: Littera scripta manet - "the written word will remain". That's true, but it won't be that much comfort to me.

TONY JONES: On December 15 last year Christopher Hitchens died in hospital in Houston, Texas. From the time of his diagnosis and throughout his illness Hitchens turned the full force of his writer's perception onto the experience he described as being deported across the invisible border between the land of the well and the land of malady. His final writings have now been published in book called Mortality. It was left to his wife Carol Blue to pen the afterword and to talk about the last days and hours of Christopher Hitchens' extraordinary life. She joined us for this interview from New York.

Carol Blue, thanks for being there.

CAROL BLUE, WIDOW OF CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS: Oh, well, thank you for having me.

TONY JONES: Now it's almost unique for a great writer to document his own fatal illness and impending death. That's what Christopher does in Mortality. And even through his worst agonies, he's able to write with great wit and lucidity. So I'm just wondering how was he able to do this? How was he able to write so beautifully in extremis?

CAROL BLUE: Well, writing and of course speaking, which is an extension of writing or the other way round, was everything to him, it was his life. And so it wasn't at all hard for him really. He also - he was quite sick at times, but he was never so sick as he couldn't tell a joke, read a book, write an article. So that was good.

TONY JONES: He summonsed up in his writings - he does in all his books obviously, but in these months before he dies, he summons up amongst others Nietzsche and Saul Bellow and Dostoevsky, Wilfred Own. He shines a kind of new light on their thoughts. So his powers of intellect and memory must have been peaking even though he was dying.

CAROL BLUE: Yeah. Well first off it was not clear to his doctors or to us that he was dying. His very radical state-of-the-art medical treatments had proved quite successful and the cancer was in abeyance. I gather from his oncologist he was in - I believe I'm right in saying the oncologist said he was in the one per cent of people who would have been alive then and we had hoped that he would either go into a long remission or certainly have quite a bit more time. He caught a very, very virulent pneumonia, a hospital pneumonia, one so powerful that everyone who came to visit in the hospital in the last few days had to wear gowns, masks, gloves and were told it could be spread outside of the hospital. So he was keeping two sets of books. He was preparing for the possibility of an impending death, but living as if he had much more time, which is what he desperately wanted. So even though he'd been sick for some time and we understood the seriousness of his condition, the ending was quite a shock to him and to me. I don't think we actually knew he was gonna die till about maybe 20 hours before.

TONY JONES: And in this time where he's not able to write fully, he's still writing little fragments which we see at the end of the book and I talked about him summoning up all those great writers. Here's one he summons up from Saul Bellow - and this must have been in his last days, I imagine - "Death is the dark backing that a mirror needs if we are able to see anything."

CAROL BLUE: Yeah. I mean, it sort of speaks for itself. I'd love to have read Christopher ruminating further on that. He also wrote about Phillip Larkin, Aubade, the great poem about courage in the face of death in which I think it's fair to say Larkin is saying courage doesn't do any good for the person who's dying, he has the courage for those around him.

TONY JONES: One of the interesting things is that he has one eye on his own disintegrating body and another eye on the strangeness of others, and with his characteristic black humour, for example, he talks about the correspondent who urges him to have his brain cryogenically frozen.

CAROL BLUE: (Laughs) Yes. And if I recall correctly, doesn't he say that would be a bit foolhardy? Wouldn't it be just for insurance better to just freeze the whole damn thing? You never know, you might need that old model when they bring you back, so. But yeah, there was ...

TONY JONES: He obviously kept his humour through all of this.

CAROL BLUE: There was lot of advice. Yeah, he really - and at home and in the hospital and in our travels about town and in restaurants and all that, he was hysterically funny throughout it all, so.

TONY JONES: You write about there being lot of advice. He says, "The citizens of Tumour Town are forever assailed with cures and rumours of cures." Is this what prompted him to start writing about cancer etiquette?

CAROL BLUE: I think so, yeah. I mean, he had a low tolerance for boredom anyway, and though he was incredibly generous with his fans and acolytes and young writers coming up, had all the time in the world for them, he was always quite polite, but would find quite tiresome some of the fans who besieged him. And he was just inundated with unbidden advice of the most idiotic type. And so, yeah, he felt compelled to tell people, "Perhaps," you know, "should you find yourself thinking you might, you know, relay some cures or other advice to a cancer patient, perhaps think twice."

TONY JONES: There's one point where he loses his voice. It changes first of all, it goes very high, and then he loses it altogether and this does spark a sort of classic Hitchens meditation on the whole nature of the writer's voice. He must have found that hell to go through.

CAROL BLUE: Yes. Freedom of speech was everything to Christopher. He believed in an absolute First Amendment. His voice, both written and spoken, was everything to him and he writes in the article that you referred to - or in the snippet that appears in Mortality - about the - how the spoken word and the written word dovetail and are kind of synergetic. And so it was very odd for this man with the most perfect voice who could command the attention of anyone, anytime, anywhere suddenly sitting at the dinner table surrounded by children and relatives trying to cut into the conversation. It was very odd. Luckily, it didn't last for very long. His voice popped back in just as he was filing that Vanity Fair piece that became part of the essay of Mortality.

TONY JONES: Yeah. Now the month of quite intensive radiotherapy was especially bad, obviously. He refers to that as a kind of hellish tide of pain in which he bucked and writhed and cursed. I mean, did he consider at that time it might be the moment to let go?

CAROL BLUE: No, not at all, actually, because he'd been given such a prognosis. When they did the follow-up scan basically it was black; no cancer was showing, so. But he had a very high threshold for pain and he never complained, so he would eat or drink and then he would kind of wince or whinny, so I thought, "This must be very painful." But it passed and he was able to have some wonderful 20-course dinners in the wake of that agony he describes.

TONY JONES: During the bouts of pneumonia that followed he remembers the actual experience of torture that he put himself through, again for a Vanity Fair article, when he had himself waterboarded. And it seems like he might have even had a kind of post-traumatic stress reaction to that torture experience because he had an absolute fear of asphyxiation afterwards, or so he writes.

CAROL BLUE: Yeah, that's true.

TONY JONES: And when he had the pneumonia it all brought that back very painfully.

CAROL BLUE: Yeah, that's true. He went through the waterboarding experience and all was well and then for some time he did have a real fear of suffocation. And so, it must have been really unbearable when he had the pneumonia because it was that same sensation, it's kind of a - I guess a drowning sensation. But, as always, he was very present, very vivid, very funny. He would emote the whole range of emotions, but he really never complained, not once. He would - but he would express his terror of suffocation.

TONY JONES: Here's a strange thing that I discovered reading the book, Carol. In this weakened and vulnerable state, the great atheist finds himself confined to bed unable to avoid the sight on the wall of a large black crucifix, as he said, embedded into the wall in his hospital room. This must have been some kind of torture for him as well.

CAROL BLUE: Yeah. Well actually in a way he didn't mind in the least because I guess he really referred to himself as an anti-theist because - well, he was an atheist, but he liked to refer to himself as an anti-theist. I guess because some atheists have a doctrinaire, dogmatic approach to their non-belief and he was sort of above that. He thought it was such a primitive and barbaric story that it wasn't even worth full-on dogmatic atheism. But, yeah, he thought it was odd because we were in a hospital - he was in a hospital in Washington - Georgetown Hospital, which is a Catholic hospital, and there was a huge Cross on top of every door, so it was a little unsettling because you think, "Mmm, perhaps we'd like to see a picture of the human genome. Perhaps that would be preferable to a giant Cross. I mean, how far is this gonna get you in the modern world of medicine?" But it didn't bother him. And in fact he always liked talking to the various chaplains and assorted religious figures that seemed to haunt the halls of hospitals. He was always willing to have a long babble with them.

TONY JONES: Debating right to the end on the nature of belief.

CAROL BLUE: Yes.

TONY JONES: Early on in his illness, Christopher wrote defiantly about wanting to face extinction fully conscious, to "do death" - as he put it, to "do death" in the active, not the passive. Is that the way he did it in the end?

CAROL BLUE: Um, well, I mean, the reason he said that of course is because he loved life so utterly and completely and he really kind of created a life for himself in which he could experience so much and see so much and do so much that it was - as he said, it was one more experience he didn't want to miss. He didn't really. He didn't face it that way only because he kind of fell asleep a few hours before he died, so.

TONY JONES: It's a terrible thought, but I've gotta say that in the fragments that he writes, some of them are very funny, some of them are quite profound and in one he actually talks about sleep and he says, "There'll be plenty of time for unconsciousness once this is all over." He saw sleep as a bit of a waste of the life that he had left.

CAROL BLUE: Yeah. Yeah. But, I mean, it was just a coupla hours, so he was completely with it and kind of holding court and, you know, the life of the party, if I can put it that way without sounding too macabre, right until the very end. You know, reading the newspaper that morning, commenting on it, you know, kind of bringing everybody into the conversation. You know, he was the cherry on top of the cupcake, the fizz in the gin and all that jazz, everything he - all the things he used to say and he really was that, completely with it and of the party until just a couple of hours before.

TONY JONES: So it must have been a terrible shock then because to go from being like that into unconsciousness, that's a pretty dramatic shift.

CAROL BLUE: Yeah. Yeah, it's just that with a very, very bad pneumonia you're very weakened, so he had been napping for the few days leading up to it. And as I say, he was ill for quite some time, but the actual - the diagnosis of his very virulent hospital-acquired pneumonia and then it's - the course it took over the last few days was quite a surprise so it was almost like, you know, getting the news that your beloved had been in a car crash. So it was kind of odd. It was not really expected at that moment at all, so that was very, very hard.

TONY JONES: Here's another one of the little fragments that he wrote obviously in the last days when he was still tapping away into his computer. It was still obviously very funny, as you've pointed out. "There are so many tributes. It also seems that rumours of my life have been greatly exaggerated."

CAROL BLUE: (Laughs) Yeah. Now he was full of those funny one-liners and aphorisms right up to the end. You know, he - when he was diagnosed, a lot of very distinguished writers wrote columns and articles about him, but he didn't really see it or know at all because I don't know that he could have anticipated the New York Times would remake its front page at midnight Eastern Time to put him on the front page and compare him to Orwell and Mark Twain in its lead. So, I think he would have - that would have been a pleasant surprise.

TONY JONES: We only really get to hear your voice right at the very end of this book when you, as you say, forced to have the last word. You actually say your husband was an impossible act to follow, but you were forced to have the last word. How hard was that for you to write about him?

CAROL BLUE: Um, terribly hard. I wanted to ask him, you know, "Well how do you think I should go about this? What tone should I take? What's the way in?" But he wasn't there to ask, and had he been, of course, I wouldn't have been tasked with this hideous and horrific assignment. But ultimately I decided that I would just try and say that - what I believe is true, which is that he lives on in his words, and it can sound trite and it's not a consolation, but it is true. And even to this day you go back and read some of his pieces on - from the last election cycle and it's as if he is here right now commenting on Mitt Romney for example. But don't you miss his voice? Don't you wish he was here, here now to ... ?

TONY JONES: Oh, Carol, completely. I mean, he would be on this program commenting on the American election ...

CAROL BLUE: Yeah.

TONY JONES: ... and I find myself wondering what he would have made of the presidential debates, what he would have said about the Mormon candidate, Mitt Romney. I mean, you can't predict that obviously, you can't know, but that's what we would have had him talking about.

CAROL BLUE: Well I know that he did say - I mean, he had pointed out in articles I think in the months leading up to his death that the Mormon church I guess had not thought black people - had not considered black people human until, I guess - fully human till I think around 1973. You might have to look that up. I'm not positive of the date. But that's not something that the President could have referred to in a debate, but it's rather interesting since Romney was a very prominent and active missionary for the church prior to that time. It's interesting. But I would have loved to hear Christopher talk about that.

TONY JONES: I think we all would have. I speak for all of our viewers when I say that. And if it's any comfort at all, people around the world, I'm sure, are still lamenting the absence of that voice. But you're right, he did write so much it's gonna be there for subsequent generations. In fact I did say this to him when I interviewed him. He said, "That's no consolation whatsoever."

CAROL BLUE: It isn't really, you know. He had so much more he wanted to do and so many more things he - and people and places he wanted to write about. He was just gearing up in fact he wanted to write something about Proust, which he had wanted to do in 2001, but then was side-tracked after 9/11, so - and that was just one of the many things that - or subjects he wanted to tackle, so. He's right, it's not much of a consolation, is it?

TONY JONES: No, it isn't. But I'll say one thing; I'm referring back I guess to that New York Times front page where he's compared to George Orwell, who was a great hero of his. Do you think there ever will be a last word on Christopher Hitchens?

CAROL BLUE: I really don't think so. I think as long as we're speaking and writing as an international society he's gonna pop up here and there over time. Don't you?

TONY JONES: I certainly do, Carol Blue. It's been a great pleasure to talk to you. We thank you very much for taking the time to come and speak to us.

CAROL BLUE: Oh, thank you very much for having me. Thank you, thank you.