"Christopher Hitchens—the incomparable critic, masterful rhetorician, fiery wit, and fearless bon vivant—died today at the age of 62. Hitchens was diagnosed with esophageal cancer in the spring of 2010, just after the publication of his memoir, Hitch-22, and began chemotherapy soon after. His matchless prose has appeared in Vanity Fair since 1992, when he was named contributing editor."

Six degree's of separation being the way of humans, I was separated by 1 degree, my step-son came to know Christopher when Hitchens took an interest in my step-sons best friend who was killed after volunteering to serve in Iraq.

" ...Having volunteered for Iraq, Mark Daily was killed in January by an I.E.D. Dismayed to learn that his pro-war articles helped persuade Daily to enlist, the author, Christopher Hitchens, measures his words against a family's grief and a young man's sacrifice." vanity fair

When Mark Daily's family had a memorial for him Hitchen's asked to attend, was graciously granted that right by the family and my step-son spent 3 days with him and drove him back to the airport.

C. said that Hitchens was polite and would sit in the kitchen and talk with him. He chained smoked his cigarettes and drank his booze. When C. was driving him to the airport at 7am in the morning, Hitchens had to make a stop at the local store to buy a few bottles of booze to get him through the day, already shaking with DT's from his few hours without it. 

Hitchens was a virulent hater of Mother Teresa, a raging alcoholic, a self-professed atheist, a delicious writer and a surprised victim of cancer.

On Mother Teresa: "Mother Teresa was not a friend of the poor. She was a friend of poverty. She said that suffering was a gift from God. She spent her life opposing the only known cure for poverty, which is the empowerment of women and the emancipation of them from a livestock version of compulsory reproduction. And she was a friend to the worst of the rich, taking misappropriated money from the atrocious Duvalier family in Haiti (whose rule she praised in return) and from Charles Keating of the Lincoln Savings and Loan. Where did that money, and all the other donations, go? The primitive hospice in Calcutta was as run down when she died as it always had been—she preferred California clinics when she got sick herself—and her order always refused to publish any audit." 

9-11 changed Hitchens: "After the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington in 2001, however, Hitchens announced he was no longer on the left – while denying he had become any kind of conservative – and "swore a sort of oath to remain coldly furious" until "fascism with an Islamic face" was "brought to a most strict and merciless account".

To the horror of former allies, he accepted invitations to the George W Bush White House; embraced the deputy defence secretary and Iraq war hawk Paul Wolfowitz as a friend ("they were finishing each other's sentences", was one account of an early meeting); and resigned from the Nation, America's foremost leftwing weekly. In 2007, after living in the US for more than 25 years, he took out American citizenship in a ceremony presided over by Bush's head of homeland security. Long friendships with the aristocracy of the Anglo-American left – Noam Chomsky, Tariq Ali, Alexander Cockburn, Edward Said – ended in harsh exchanges."  

On Religion & God: "“I suppose that one reason I have always detested religion is its sly tendency to insinuate the idea that the universe is designed with 'you' in mind or, even worse, that there is a divine plan into which one fits whether one knows it or not. This kind of modesty is too arrogant for me.” 

I've read Hitchens for 20 years and always enjoyed his articles even when I wholeheartedly disagreed with him. 

Being a believer in God myself, I've always wondered what happens when atheists die and realize there is indeed life after death? I can imagine Hitchens: "Hey! No shit!"