The party will still be going on

Christopher Hitchens is believed by many to be terminally ill, to be going to die of his esophageal cancer. He himself said in March, on 60 Minutes (on YouTube while it lasts), that the chance of surviving it is about one in twenty. He said he was trying to live as though he would win at the odds.
    Yesterday, in my reading of Hitchens's 2010 memoir, Hitch-22, I discovered that the beginning of his chapter disclosing "Something of Myself" speaks eloquently about living:

About once or twice every month I engage in public debates with those whose pressing need it is to woo and to win the approval of supernatural beings. Very often, when I give my view...I attract pitying looks and anxious questions. How, in that case, I am asked, do I find meaning and purpose in life?....
    ...A life that partakes even a little of friendship, love, irony, humor, parenthood, literature, and music, and the chance to take part in battles for the liberation of others cannot be called "meaningless"...Whereas, if one sought to define meaninglessness and futility, the idea that a human life should be expended in the guilty, fearful, self-obsessed propitiation of supernatural nonentities...[ellipsis his]...but there, there. Enough. [pp. 330-331]

To be "terminally ill," in usual parlance, is to have been diagnosed with a particular illness of which one is expected to die. We are all terminally ill in the sense that we are going to die of something, even if "only old age." But we don't think about that. We tend to think of terminal illness only when we are given a specific diagnosis.
    Christopher Hitchens was thinking about it before he got the specific diagnosis. The passage above continues by addressing terminal illness in a more general sense:

The clear awareness of having been born into a losing struggle need not lead one to despair. I do not especially like the idea that one day I shall be tapped on the shoulder and informed, not that the party is over but that it is most assuredly going on—only henceforth in my absence. (It's the second of those thoughts: the edition of the newspaper that will come out on the day after I have gone, that is the more distressing.) Much more horrible, though, would be the announcement that the party was continuing forever, and that I was forbidden to leave. Whether it was a hellishly bad party or a party that was perfectly heavenly in every respect, the moment that it became eternal and compulsory would be the precise moment that it began to pall. [p. 331]

    I assume that Hitchens's "tap on the shoulder" is purely metaphorical—not literal, like the young supernaturalist's use of the image on the bus yesterday.