God bless you, Dr. Kevorkian (2 page)

©

by Kurt Vonnegut

A Seven Stories First Edition

Seven Stories Press

Watts Street

New York, NY

Distributed in Canada by

Toronto.

Distributed in the

by

London.

All rights reserved.

Special thanks to Marty

ofWNYC, who served as city

desk editor to our roving reporter on the Afterlife, encouraging him to keep digging away at the story, and getting public radio to pay him a buck a word, which isn't bad for an out-of-the-way beat like Heaven.

Portions of the introduction to this book were adapted from a graduation address delivered by the author at Agnes Scott College, Atlanta, Georgia, on May

1999.

ISBN:

Printed in the

INTRODUCTION .

GOD BLESSYOU, DR KEVORKIAN
21

THE AFTERLIFE

My first near-death experience was an accident, a botched anesthesia during a triple bypass. I had listened to several people on TV talk shows who had gone down the blue tunnel to the Pearly Gates, and even beyond the Pearly Gates, or so they said, and then come back to life

But I certainly wouldn't have

set out on such a risky expedition on purpose, without first having survived one, and then planned another in cooperation with Dr. Jack Kevorkian and the staff at the state-of-the-art lethal injection execution facility at

Texas.

The following reports were recorded for later broadcast by radio station WNYC. I hope they convey

a sense of immediacy. They were taped in the tiled Huntsville death chamber only five minutes or so after I was unstrapped from the gurney. The tape recorder, incidentally, like the gurney, was the property of the good people of Texas, and was ordinarily used to immortalize the last words of persons about to make a one-way, all-expenses-paid trip to Paradise. There will be no more round trips for me, barring another accident. For the sake of my family, I am trying to reinstate my health and life insurance polices, if possible. But other journalists, and perhaps even tourists, will surely follow the safe two-way path to Eternity I pioneered. I beg them to be content, as I learned to be, with interviews they are able to conduct on the hundred yards or so of vacant lot between the far end of the blue tunnel and the Pearly Gates. To go through the Pearly