God bless you, Dr. Kevorkian (3 page)

no matter how

tempting the interviewee on the other side, as I myself discovered the hard way, is to run the risk that crotch-

ety Saint Peter, depending on his

may never let

you out again. Think of how heartbroken your friends and relatives would be if, by going through the Pearly Gates to talk to Napoleon, say, you in effect committed About belief or lack of belief in an Some of

you may know that I am neither Christian nor Jewish nor Buddhist, nor a conventionally religious person of any sort.

I am a

which means, in part, that I have

tried to behave decently without any expectation of rewards or punishments after I'm dead. My GermanAmerican ancestors, the earliest of whom settled in our Middle West about the time of our Civil War, called themselves "Freethinkers," which is the same sort of thing. My great grandfather Clemens Vonnegut

wrote, for example, "If what Jesus said was good, what can it matter whether he was God or not?" I myself have written, "If it weren't for the message of mercy and pity in Jesus' Sermon on the Mount, I wouldn't want to be a human being. I would just as soon be a rattlesnake."

I am honorary president of the American Humanist Association, having succeeded the late, great, spectacularly prolific writer and scientist, Dr. Isaac Asimov in that essentially functionless capacity. At an memorial service for my predecessor I said, "Isaac is up in Heaven now." That was the funniest thing I could have said to an audience of humanists. It rolled them in the aisles. Mirth! Several minutes had to pass before something resembling solemnity could be restored.

I made that joke, of course, before my first neardeath accidental one.

So when my own time comes to join the choir
10

invisible or whatever, God forbid, I hope someone will say,

up in Heaven now." Who really knows? I could have dreamed all this.

My epitaph in any case? "Everything was beautiful. Nothing hurt." I will have gotten off so light, whatever the heck it is that was going on. Humanists, having received no credible information about any sort of God, are content to serve as well as they can, the only abstraction with which they have some familiarity: their communities. They don't have to join the

to be one.

Yes, and this booklet of my conversations with the dead-and-buried was created in the hope that it would earn a little bit of