Timequake

by Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

Trout might have said, and it can be said of me as well, that he created caricatures rather than characters. His animus against so-called mainstream literature, moreover, wasn’t peculiar to him. It was generic among writers of science fiction.

When I got home from my war, my uncle Dan clapped me on the back, and he bellowed, “You’re a man now!” I damn near killed my first German.

When I myself am dead, God forbid, I hope some wag will say about me, “He’s up in Heaven now.”

Then again, I am a monopolar depressive descended from monopolar depressives. That’s how come I write so good.

“Science never cheered up anyone. The truth about the human situation is just too awful.”

Jane was life-loving and optimistic, a scrapper against carcinoma to the very end. Allie’s last words expressed relief, and nothing more.

What Jane anticipated with such joy again and again was some event involving one or more of our six children, now all adults with children of their own: a psychiatric nurse, a comedy writer, a pediatrician, a painter, an airline pilot, and a printmaker.

I did not speak at her Episcopal obsequy. I wasn’t up to it. Everything I had to say was for her ears alone, and she was gone.

Our son the doctor Mark would say after she died that he himself would never have submitted to all the medical procedures she acquiesced to in order to stay alive as long as she could, to go on saying, her eyes shining, “I can’t wait!”

Jane could believe with all her heart anything that made being alive seem full of white magic. That was her strength. She was raised a Quaker, but stopped going to meetings of Friends after her four happy years at Swarthmore. She became an Episcopalian after marrying Adam, who remained a Jew. She died believing in the Trinity and Heaven and Hell and all the rest of it. I’m so glad. Why? Because I loved her.

I would have recognized the opportunity for a world-class joke, but would never allow myself to be funny at the cost of making somebody else feel like something the cat drug in. Let that be my epitaph.

This was a huge blow to me because I was used to doing well in school. I thought there was nothing I couldn’t do if I just wanted it bad enough.”

colostomy to his self-regard.

Three Horsemen of the Oncologic Apocalypse, Surgery, Chemotherapy, and Radiation.