The moment Kurt Vonnegut entered my life is seared indelibly in my memory. It stands out starkly, like my first period or my first kiss. All of those memories share a common theme: afterwards, my life was forever changed. I was thirteen, and my friend’s unusually permissive mother left me unsupervised in her well-stocked library. I don’t know why I pulled Mother Night off the shelves. The cover was black with a picture of a man in a blue outfit riding a dachshund, but I would not have detected that from the novel’s spine. Whatever guided me to the book, I curled up on the library floor and read the entire thing in one endless afternoon.
It was an electrifying experience start to finish. It was about sex and death and Nazis and spies, which sounds exciting enough, but it was not the subject matter but how the story was told that intrigued me. I had suspected for some time that adults knew The Truth About Everything and were keeping it from me, and now I had the proof in my hands. This book had stared into the face of evil and evil had stared back. Then this book blew a raspberry in evil’s face. It was unflinching, it was hysterical, it was naughty, and it was unforgettable. By the shocking ending in the Israeli jail, I was addicted. Some kids get hooked on drugs, others get hooked on casual sex, I got hooked on Vonnegut.
By high school, I was a total Vonnegut disciple. I started referring to him (as I still do) solely by his first name, as if we were intimate friends. I framed a picture of him and put it on my nightstand. I was ardently devoted to the radical truths he espoused: that most people were lazy and ignorant but deserved love anyway, that life was meaningless but sometimes wonderful, and that “God damn it, you’ve got to be kind.” In his words, I saw a vision for a more humane, saner, smarter world. That’s not to say I thought he was perfect. Towards the end of his career he became a very cranky old man, and I sometimes felt that he went too far with his contempt for people less intelligent than he. We also had vastly different viewpoints about religion. But then I thought, what do I know? I’m just a snot-nosed high schooler from Texas. He won a Purple Heart in World War II.
I will never forget where I was when I found out that Kurt died. It was in the middle of a very rough spring semester. I signed into my Yahoo mail and there was the headline: Kurt Vonnegut has died. I must have screamed or made some sound, because my roommate called from her room, “I saw it earlier. I wanted to tell you but I figured you already knew.” I don’t know how long I sat there after that. The next few days were a blur. I sleepwalked through my classes, wrote embarrassing, florid poetry more suited for a heartbroken tween than a college junior. One thing that kept running through my head, the thing I tearfully whispered over the phone to my best friend late at night, was that I never wrote him a letter. I never told him how much I loved his books or thanked him for all he had done for me.
The hardest part of losing Kurt, for me, was thinking about what happens after death. Kurt was a confirmed atheist, who once quipped that his favorite joke was to say that someone was up in Heaven. Kurt’s atheism always bothered me, even before his death. After he died, I could no longer avoid the topic or pretend he might change his mind. I had to face my feelings on the subject. I wished that he believed in something—not because I thought being an atheist was a bad thing to be, or because I didn’t understand his reasons for being one. No, what hurt me was the thought that someone who had been through so much (World War II, the suicide of his mother, his sister’s long, painful battle with cancer and his subsequent adoption of her four children) was not able to feel the comfort that I felt from the belief in a benevolent God. I felt he could use the relief of knowing our time here was short, and after death there is eternal peace. Towards the end of his career, Kurt wrote often and longingly about death. It made me so sad to think that his idea of what was coming next was so different from my idea. I guess I had foolishly hoped I would finally get to meet him in Heaven.
In 2012, I made the pilgrimage to the Vonnegut Library in Indianapolis, Indiana. Allegedly, I was in town for the Super Bowl, but that held as little attraction for me as the library did for my fiancé. He dutifully dropped me off downtown and made me promise I would show up at the Lucas Oil stadium in time for the festivities.
The library is a small, unassuming building right in the middle of downtown. There weren’t many people there the day I visited. I chatted with the boy at the door about how much I’d hated the most recent biography and how I’d made my fiancé read Slaughterhouse-5 before I’d agree to marry him. In this sacred place, I felt comfortable opening up to a total stranger. I perused the papers and miscellaneous artifacts seriously, trying to commit each item to memory because this was as close to my idol as I was ever going to get.
As I stood in front of his trusty Smith-Corona, the typewriter that had birthed so much of my personal philosophy, I suddenly and unexpectedly wept. I recalled his quote from Timequake, a response to the question “why bother writing?”
“Many people need desperately to receive this message: I feel and think much as you do, care about many of the things you care about…you are not alone.”
Kurt had always made me feel that I was not alone, and in that moment, I felt like he was there with me, clucking at me in disapproval over my shoulder as I fell to pieces at the sight of his typewriter behind glass. I felt that he knew, as I did, that life on earth was short. He chose to pursue eternal life not through belief in Heaven, but in the legacy he left behind through his wonderful stories. When I am long gone, my great-great grandchildren will slip away into a corner of a public library and be filled with delight as they read their very first Vonnegut. In a small library in the heartland of America, I realized that it doesn’t matter if Kurt and I agree on what happens after we die. His work taught me (much like my Bible taught me) to focus on how to actually live before we die.
So happy birthday, Kurt. Wherever you are. It doesn’t really matter. You will always be my hero. So it goes.
