God Bless You Dr. Kevorkian - Kurt Vonnegut [3]
She concluded, with impressive scientific proofs, that infants need a secure attachment to a mother figure at the beginning of life, if they are to thrive. Otherwise, they will be forever anxious.
I wanted her to talk some about nature versus nurture, and also about the mothering I myself had received when a neonate—whether that might not go a long way toward explaining me.
But Dr. Ainsworth was bubbling over with excitement over how her theories were confirmed in Heaven. Never mind all the honors she’d received from fellow psychologists on Earth. It turns out that there are nurseries and nursery schools and kindergartens in Heaven for people who died when they were babies. Volunteer surrogate mothers, or sometimes the babies’ actual mothers, if they’re dead, bond like crazy with the little souls. Cuddle, cuddle, cuddle. Kiss, kiss, kiss. Don’t cry, little baby. Your mommy loves you. Bet you have to burp. I’ll bet that’s the trouble. There. Feel better? Time to go sleepy-bye. Goo, goo, goo.
And the babies grow up to be angels. That’s where angels come from!
This is Kurt Vonnegut, signing off in the lethal injection facility in Huntsville, Texas. Until the next time, goo goo goo and ta ta.
this morning, thanks to a controlled
near-death experience, I was lucky enough to meet, at the far end of the blue tunnel, a man named Salvatore Biagini. Last July 8th, Mr. Biagini, a retired construction worker, age seventy, suffered a fatal heart attack while rescuing his beloved schnauzer, Teddy, from an assault by an unrestrained pit bull named Chele, in Queens.
The pit bull, with no previous record of violence against man or beast, jumped a four-foot fence in order to have at Teddy. Mr. Biagini, an unarmed man with a history of heart trouble, grabbed him, allowing the schnauzer to run away. So the pit bull bit Mr. Biagini in several places and then Mr. Biagini’s heart quit beating, never to beat again.
I asked this heroic pet lover how it felt to have died for a schnauzer named Teddy. Salvador Biagini was philosophical. He said it sure as heck beat dying for absolutely nothing in the Viet Nam War.
after this morning’s controlled
near-death experience I am almost literally heartbroken that there was no way for me to take a tape recorder down the blue tunnel to Heaven and back again. Never before had there been a New Orleans–style brass band, led by the late Louis Armstrong, to greet a new arrival with a rousing rendition of “When the Saints Come Marching In.” The recipient of this very rare and merry honor, accorded to only one in ten million newly dead people, I’m told, was an Australian Aborigine, with some white blood, named Birnum Birnum.
When white settlers came in the nineteenth century, the natives of Australia and nearby Tasmania had the simplest and most primitive cultures of any people then on Earth. They were regarded as vermin, with no more minds and souls than rats, say. They were shot; they were poisoned. Only in 1967, practically the day before yesterday, were the surviving Australian Aborigines granted citizenship, thanks to demonstrations led by Birnum Birnum. He was the first of his people to attend law school.
There were no survivors on Tasmania. I asked him for a sound bite about the Tasmanians to take back to WNYC. He said they were victims of the only completely successful genocide of which we know. Louis Armstrong broke into our conversation to say the Tasmanians were as gifted and intelligent as anybody, given good teachers. Two members of his current band, he said, were Tasmanians. One played clarinet; the other one played a mean gutbucket, or slide trombone.
This is Kurt Vonnegut, WNYC’s reporter on the Afterlife, signing off.
today’s controlled near-death
experience was a real honey! I interviewed