Hospice and Sci Fi - God Bless You Mr. Vonnegut!

God Bless You Dr. Kevorkian, Kurt Vonnegut Seven Stories Press, 1999, HC, 79 p[ages, ISBN 1-58322-020-8
I have to first make it very clear that this book is not about euthanasia and none of the comments in this review have anything to do with euthansasia. That said, we can start our review:
Science fiction has always dabbled in themes of death and dying. One of the first science fiction stories ever written had a death bed theme. It was entitled, The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar  and the author was none other than our beloved Edgar Allen Poe. Now Poe was a master of the hoax  and a magazine article writer who needed to sell his writings. This piece has that air to it, it deals with the communications of a gentleman who is mesmerized just as he is passing away. He  stays in a sort of suspended animation and shrivels up when after several weeks he is released from the mesmeric spell. Poe was a master of the gory ending, and here is no exception. He wrote several other stories about mesmerism and it was a theme that was passed to the theosophists who really ran with it! So I don’t hold that there is much for the hospice professional to glean from this story but it is interesting to note that from the start sci fi authors found this subject fertile ground for their speculations.
Jump ahead 150 years or so. There you will find Kurt Vonnegut strapped to a gurney in Huntsville State Prison, Texas, 1999. He is taking a series of controlled near death experiences at the hands of …our beloved Dr. Kevorkian. Vonnegut is going into the afterlife to interview illustrious and not so illustrious people for WNYC radio.
 Our interviewer usually meets his subjects in the "100 yards or so of  vacant lot between the end of the blue tunnel and the Pearly Gates" because St. Peter can be crotchety and if he closes the gates when you’re inside…well, there’s no return trip .
As far as the interviews, we hear from Isaac Asimov, John Brown, Sir Issac Newton, Eugene Debs, Adolph Hitler, William Shakespeare, Birnum Birnum and about 15 others. We actually meet Karla Faye Tucker in the blue tunnel as she is on her way after receiving a lethal injection at Huntsville only hours earlier.
 Mr. Vonnegut has specific questions for these folks and the answers are often unexpected, thought provoking and funny. If we look closely we see a that the answers might reflect different varieties of experience and personality types…Sir Isaac Newton is eternally dissatisfied because as he looks down and sees modern inventions that he could (and should) have invented. Shakespeare is flowery and evasive,  Karla Faye Tucker is mad, John Brown is a bit righteous…but I don’t want to give the impression that there is any pattern or that the author is poking fun for this is definitely not the case.
In fact, the  most impressive thing about this little book is that the tone is serious, compassionate and never disparaging or cynical. Yet there is a certain whimsy. This is Kurt Vonnegut’s absolute genius. We recognize it from his other books. He knows sorrow. But he sees and lets us share his vision with joyful eyes. He is the humanist who cares about people and their condition and shares the perspective of those who can look back with reflection about their time on earth and/or continue the work wherever they may be (see Dr. Mary D. Ainsworth). In this respect "heaven" may not be so different than earth.
As one of our top writers Vonnegut has gone directly to the heart of the death and dying issue and transformed it with his presence. Isn’t that what its all about? We can even have more compassion for Kevorkian as we read. Now you get a taste of how far sci fi has come in just a wink of eternal time. As the good humanist says… God Bless you Mr. Vonnegut!