I write this on the 12th anniversary of the death of Christopher Hitchens.

He was a writer and speaker, an off-the-cuff, booze-and-cigarette-soaked wit of unparalleled caliber. He could find a literary or historical reference for any occasion, and it could be an education just to listen to him talk.

Hitchens was, like all humans, imperfect, but he reveled in those imperfections. He rolled around in them, smeared them on his chest, seemed not just unable to hide them but to be completely unwilling to do so. His flaws were glorious, as bright and dangerous as an explosion.

Voicing your opinions — well, even voicing facts these days — requires a tremendous amount of bravery. Christopher Hitchens was the Alexander the Great of bravery.

His bravery sometimes blurred the line between virtue and vice, and it could be difficult to tell when to marvel at his fearlessness and when to cringe at it.

But it took gonads the size of Mount Rushmore to lay into Mother Teresa with a ferocity that Caligula would envy. Maybe he was right about her, I don't know, but he never could pass up an opportunity to find fault in saints.

In April of 1941, after Hitler took over for the floundering Mussolini and occupied Greece, he raised a Nazi flag over the Parthenon. About a month later, though, in the middle of the night, two Greek teenagers climbed up and ripped that flag right down.

Christopher Hitchens was a lover of Greece, and he was also a flag-ripper, and he had a talent for finding flags that no one else dared rip down.

When Jerry Falwell died in 2007, CNN brought in Hitchens to comment. As the final notes of a heavenly choir faded away, Anderson Cooper introduced Hitchens.

In the hagiography's echo, Hitch unleashed a fusillade of insults so blistering, so coarse, so hilarious that I occasionally rewatch the video when I need a good laugh. He calls Falwell a "Chaucerian fraud" and answers Cooper's question about whether Falwell was a genuine believer thusly:

"If he read the Bible at all — and I would doubt that he could actually read any long book, at all — that he did so only in the most hucksterish, as we say, Bible-pounding way."

But almost as delightful as the way Hitchens unmoors himself from convention is the stunned look on Cooper's face.

You can almost see him think to himself, "This guy is speaking — more than ill, let's say speaking violently of the dead. And we're getting it all on film!"

Occasionally, I think about what Hitchens' mail must have looked like after that interview, what people must have said and threatened to do to him. And yet I don't remember him ever complaining.

The only thing worse than being Christopher Hitchens, he might have thought, was being a half-assed Christopher Hitchens, and so he never muzzled himself, whether for his benefit or detriment.

In trying to decide whether waterboarding was torture, in fact, Hitchens agreed to undergo it, putting his access to oxygen where his mouth was. As a result, he wrote an article for Vanity Fair called "Believe Me, It's Torture," proving that the Bush administration's fancy legal chicanery was just hairsplitting nonsense. I can't imagine another opinion-vendor being willing to similarly endanger themselves in the pursuit of truth. Would Tucker Carlson get waterboarded? Would Joy Reid?

I've found myself thinking more and more about how much we need Hitchens — his honesty, his bravery — these days.

Even when I disagreed with him — about low-stakes topics like whether women are funny or high-stakes ones like the Iraq War — I still understood that he was a unique resource.

He was a diamond, one that cut, but, far more often, one that shone.

In short, even though I never met Christopher Hitchens, I miss him.

To learn more about Georgia Garvey, visit GeorgiaGarvey.com.

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