More sad news: Charles Krauthammer is dying
This news is not completely unexpected. I was thinking about Krauthammer the other day, who has had undisclosed but obviously serious health problems for almost a year, and wondering how he might be and when we might be hearing from him. Well, now he’s written a note:
“I have been uncharacteristically silent these past ten months,” the letter began. “I had thought that silence would soon be coming to an end, but I’m afraid I must tell you now that fate has decided on a different course for me.”
Krauthammer, who graduated from Harvard Medical School in 1975 despite a first-year diving accident that left him a quadriplegic, explained that he had a malignant tumor removed from his abdomen last August. Although a series of setbacks left him in the hospital in the ensuing months, he believed until recently that he was on the road to recovery.
“However, recent tests have revealed that the cancer has returned,” Krauthammer wrote. “There was no sign of it as recently as a month ago, which means it is aggressive and spreading rapidly. My doctors tell me their best estimate is that I have only a few weeks left to live. This is the final verdict. My fight is over.”
Krauthammer added that he has no regrets, and that he’s had a wonderful life.
As a young man, Krauthammer experienced a blow that might have derailed his life. But he ultimately regrouped and made a life full of achievement, love, and friendship. Being a quadriplegic must have led to a host of huge problems and challenges, but Krauthammer seems to have met them all in spectacular fashion.
It’s a mystery how lives go, isn’t it? One person’s unrecoverable setback is another person’s small and temporary speed bump. I have very much missed Krauthammer’s mostly witty and insightful commentary, and I am very sorry that he’s facing what appears to be a terminal illness.
Powerline has a post that has a really good interview of Krauthammer with Charles Kessler. It’s worth watching. And, Neo, you will like his take on Churchill in the 2nd part.
God bless Charles Krauthammer.
I just did a couple of dozen push-ups. To remind me that no matter how many times I push the earth away from myself, we are all dying. Feel free to flame.
I have admired Krauthammer’s thought processes at various times, and it recently occurred to me that I haven’t noticed anything by him in some time.
Bourdain, by way of contrast, meant nothing to me. I don’t believe I ever ran across him.
Everyone dies. Is this always sad?
miklos:
I think that death is always sad for loved ones, even deaths of the very elderly.
Suicides in particular are very sad, especially of someone who is not extremely old and/or not terminally ill and suffering, and even then they are very very sad.
Krauthammer was a classy fellow. You did’t have to agree with him on every issue, but you had to respect the fact that his opinions were always well thought out, based on strong principles, and delivered in a gentlemanly manner. When the time comes, RIP CK.
He was simply the best. Clear. Concise. Conservative.
Charles Krauthammer was a changer. He wrote for The New Republic, as well as for Walter Mondale. In one of his works (Things That Matter) he said he abandoned (the modern version of) liberalism because it just plain didn’t appear to work.
Charles Krauthammer was a giant.
Charles Krauthammer was a changer. He wrote for The New Republic, as well as for Walter Mondale. In one of his works (Things That Matter) he said he abandoned (the modern version of) liberalism because it just didn’t appear to work.
Charles Krauthammer was a giant.
neo,
Looks like the edit function you painstakingly prepared for us a few months ago isn’t working properly now.
(I’m using a Firefox browser.)
M J R
M J R:
Thanks for reminding me.
I had to turn off the edit function after I updated the plugin and it wasn’t working right, plus it seemed to be interfering in other ways with comments. I meant to try it again after things calmed down, but I forgot to do that. I just now re-activated it and for the moment it seems to be working, and preview seems to be working as well (which hadn’t worked for ages).
We’ll see how long this lasts.
I don’t usually pay much attention to the deaths of celebrities – it seems a little creepy to mourn someone I’ve never met. But Charles Krauthammer will be a real loss. What a remarkable person — not just brilliant and eloquent, but also possessed of what our grandparents used to call character. And such a pleasure to read or listen to. He’ll leave a gap that won’t be filled.
Dear Neo,
I was terribly saddened to hear the news today about Mr. Krauthammer. Prior to 9/11, I had little use for blogs or newspapers. Immediately after, I had an unquenchable desire for information that would help me understand more of the world around me. Charles Krauthammer was the first voice of intelligence and reason that I found with his article about “Triumphalism”. Ever since, I have followed him with great respect and admiration. He has been a giant amongst mostly Lilliputians. I shall miss his insight and his personality.
Thank You for posting this
Poor Krauthammer is not ‘facing’ a terminal illness. He has a terminal illness and is in its latter stages. It will be increasingly painful, with bouts of small bowel obstruction. It is a miserable business. I expect he has declined desperation salvage attempts with chemo or radiation.
The poor man will be really doped up by heavy opioid dosages, perhaps even requiring an opioid coma for totally intolerable pain. The same form of death comes to women with Stage 4 ovarian cancer.
It is worse than being crucified. May God’s mercy be bountiful for Dr. K.
What do you say to someone who has only a few weeks to live? I can think of nothing better than to say that his life mattered and he lived it with courage. As Charles Krauthammer did. Fair winds and following seas to this wonderful man with the huge intellect and a way with words.
Cicero – I find nothing harder that imagining myself in the position of someone like Krauthammer, not just about to die, but knowing it, and knowing it will be miserable, as if stamped with an expiration date right on your forehead and then rotting away like spoiled meat.
It’s too much. Perhaps I’m weak, but I have to distract myself from such thoughts and pretend, as best I can, that it won’t happen to me (until it does).
J.J. – And as far as my above confession goes, I’d have to imagine that what you said would be the only type of comfort I’d be capable of hearing: to have the assurance of others outside of my own ego that I did not waste my life. And along with that, the faint, probably delusional hope that the mark of my presence on this earth won’t go away.
I think people like me who have trouble believing in an afterlife really don’t take the implications of our position seriously until the moment arrives. “Nothing” is just a word until the reality of “I will be nothing” grabs you by the throat. Then we feel how cold the void really is – so much so, that even the bizarre notion of ersatz immortality via a name or a deed or a work remembered is no small comfort.
I hope everything works out better than I think it does and Krauthammer is off to somewhere better. I hope we all are.
I have long admired Dr. Krauthammer. He perservered, and conqoured over so many things, I was hoping he was indestructable. May God bring him peace, he has earned it.
I feel a pending sense of personal loss. Dr Krauthammer was without peer, in intellect and wit. While I agreed with the vast majority of his opinion, there were small differences, so small to be nearly meaningless. What I liked the most from this man is his integrity. His is supreme, he could always be trusted. It is hard to find someone who that could be said about.
May he find comfort in the arms of Angels…
Being Jewish, I know heaven is out, but perhaps we could meet in mine.
The poor man will be really doped up by heavy opioid dosages, perhaps even requiring an opioid coma for totally intolerable pain. The same form of death comes to women with Stage 4 ovarian cancer. It is worse than being crucified. May God’s mercy be bountiful for Dr. K.
Quit talking out of your ass. The abdominal cancer patient in my circle of friends was perfectly lucid up until 2 days before he died and never in any coma at all.
Just to point out that Krauthammer could move his arms and operate a motor vehicle. One of his columns for Time was a tribute to the engineer who designed vans for the disabled like the one he drove. From watching videos of him, it does appear as if he required a device to assist his diaphragm.
Charles Krauthammer was a changer. He wrote for The New Republic, as well as for Walter Mondale. In one of his works (Things That Matter) he said he abandoned (the modern version of) liberalism because it just plain didn’t appear to work.
His best work consisted of long-form essays written at The New Republic 35 years ago. The newspaper column was not the ideal format for his thinking and he never mastered it the way George Will, Mark Steyn, or Jonah Goldberg have. If you look back, the beginnings of his departure from the left can be seen in an aversion to popular therapeutic discourse. (That alienation you could see in Christopher Lasch’s work as well, though Krauthammer tended to be rather cutting about some of Lasch’s oeuvre). After 1982, he took up a critique of the virtue-signaling, anti-patriotism, and impractical functional pacifism to be found in portside discussions of foreign affairs within and without the body of Democratic office holders. It wasn’t until about 1995 that he took to siding with Republicans in re domestic policy, and his views were not as well articulated in this realm. He was always an antagonist of evangelical discussions.
There are a few thinkers who appear every now and then who are effectively irreplaceable. Prof. Barry Rubin was one, Eric Hoffer of course. Their common characteristics seem to be an ability to describe succinctly the obvious. Reality is very hard to determine as Kissenger said and there always the well-funded institutions dedicated to its obstruction. Men like C.K. could cut through the popular bilge and be just enough unfeeling to be gentlemanly impolite, and therefore cutting, in their delivery.
How the lying class must have hated him.
From now on we will just have to ask ourselves what C.K. would have said and develop our answers trying to use his methods.