If we don’t romanticize illness, that’s not to say that our “realism” isn’t full of denial. Over and over writers express surprise that their minds really are housed in bodies. After his own cancer diagnosis, Anatole Broyard wrote, in a piece that initially appeared in The New York Times Magazine in 1989, that while the diagnosis didn’t make him believe that cancer “was going to kill me” (although of course it did), “what struck me was the startled awareness that one day something, whatever it might be, was going to interrupt my leisurely progress. It sounds trite, yet I can only say that I realized for the first time that I don’t have forever.” In notes appended to “Mortality,” Hitchens observes: “Always prided myself on my reasoning faculty and my stoic materialism. I don’t have a body, I am a body. Yet consciously and regularly acted as if this was not true, or as if an exception would be made in my case.”

The process of diminishment is at once a galvanizing subject for the writer and a terrifying one: Will it silence me before I get to describe it? You cannot describe what can’t ultimately be endured. And as fascinating as these documentary works are, they are necessarily limited. The writers can’t write the final chapter of the work they’re making, because the final chapter is death; in this sense, they remain strangely fictive. The reader fills in the blanks. In fact, the eighth chapter of “Mortality” consists of Hitchens’s jotted notes — the most affecting possible conclusion, more emphatically conveying the reality of wasting away than any elegantly wrought essay might. This failure is necessary to their power, even if the reader craves, sometimes, the shaped piece, the finished object. As Anatole Broyard wrote, “Stories are antibodies against illness and pain.”

THE literature of AIDS clearly helped pave the way for the new openness about what it’s like to die. The disease’s most deadly era saw a proliferation of illness memoirs written by caretakers (some of whom themselves fell ill while writing), including Paul Monette’s “Borrowed Time” (1988) and Mark Doty’s “Heaven’s Coast” (1996). Because these memoirs were not only literary accounts but profound acts of social witness — humanizing the tragedy and helping wash away its stigma — they opened a space for a kind of writing about death that Americans might previously have considered morbid. (Recall that it wasn’t until the 1970s that doctors regularly began to tell patients with fatal diseases that they were dying; previously, it was considered better to keep the bad news from the terminally ill.)

Among my favorite works of that era are Tim Dlugos’s late poems. They have the jaunty “I did this, I did that” style of Frank O’Hara, inflected with the gravitas of death. Dlugos takes stock, like others, of the physical degradation of the body, “the shiny / hamburger-in-lucite look / of the big lesion on my face; / the smaller ones I daub / with makeup; the loss / of forty pounds in a year.” But he also searched for meaning in his suffering, concluding: “The symptoms float like algae / on the surface of the grace / that buoys me up today.” His work is remarkable, pivoting from bald reportage on a friend’s outcry — “ ‘I hate this, I hate your / being sick and having AIDS / and lying in a hospital / where I can only see you / with a visitor’s pass’ ” — to transcendent hope:

When

Joe O’Hare flew in last week,

he asked what were the best

times of my New York years;

I said “Today,” and meant it.

I hope that death will lift me

by the hair like an angel

in a Hebrew myth, snatch me with

the strength of sleep’s embrace,

and gently set me down

where I’m supposed to be,

in just the right place.

But for me the great poem of protracted death is James Merrill’s “Christmas Tree,” which was written in the final weeks of his life. Merrill was dying of AIDS, although this information wasn’t made public until years after his death. The book includes many extraordinary poems about mortality, many of them self-portraits. Particularly moving is the final poem, “An Upward Look,” which describes the world as “this vast facility the living come / dearest to die in” — medicalizing, as it were, all of existence. But, in a sense, the book’s capstone is the poem that didn’t make it in. “Christmas Tree” is a “shape poem,” taking the form of the right half of a Christmas tree, narrowing at the end to a trunk. A dramatic monologue, it’s spoken by the tree a family has brought down “from the cold sighing mountain” to decorate the family home. The tree knows it must soon die. But nonetheless it speaks of being feted, finding that, “honestly, / It did help to be wound in jewels, to send / Their colors flashing forth from vents in the deep / Fragrant sable that cloaked me head to foot.”

The poem is remarkable, I think, for its combination of rich descriptive language and stark reflection on the slow fade of the body; for its ability to convey both the painful vividness of life and the sorrowful muting of physical diminishment. Unlike Keats’s speaker in “Ode to a Nightingale,” musing on the immortal sublimity of the nightingale and the painless release of death, Merrill’s Christmas tree must reflect on its disembodiment:

Yes, yes, what lay ahead

Was clear: the stripping, the cold street, my

chemicals

Plowed back into Earth for lives to come —

No doubt a blessing, a harvest, but one that doesn’t

bear,

Now or ever, dwelling upon. To have grown so thin.

Needles and bone. The little boy’s hands meeting

About my spine.

The shape of the poem powerfully intensifies the realization of death, and enacts it (much as Hitchens’s scattered notes enact his death). At the end, the poem shifts to short lines and sentence fragments:

No dread. No bitterness. The end beginning. Today’s

Dusk room aglow

For the last time

With candlelight.

Faces love lit,

Gifts underfoot.

Still to be so poised, so

Receptive. Still to recall, to praise.