Friday, July 25, 2008

Kurt Vonnegut to Julie

I found myself thinking a lot about julie today. Someone on the bus reminded me of her. She had sweet blue eyes and long blonde hair in a pony tail, and seemed to be enjoying her life.

I know a lot of us may disagree on religion, the extent to which, and in exactly what to believe, how to resolve the juxtaposition of faith to scientific reason, and regarding the basic ideas of faith and worship. I am agnostic, a humansit actually, which basically means that I just believe in trying to be nice and decent, for no other reason than that it is clearly the right thing to do. What could be better? I think Julie was a humanist first.

One of my favorite authors was Kurt Vonnegut, who bumped his head and died last year or so. And I offer this little gem of an anecdote that illustrates his and the humanist's perspective on things:

I am honorary president of the American Humanist Association, having succeeded the late, great, spectacularly prolific writer and scientist, Dr. Isaac Asimov in that essentially functionless capacity. At an A.H.A. memorial service for my predecessor I said, "Isaac is up in Heaven now." That was the funniest thing I could have said to an audience of humanists. It rolled them in the aisles. Mirth! Several minutes had to pass before something resembling solemnity could be restored.I made that joke, of course, before my first near-death experience — the accidental one.So when my own time comes to join the choir invisible or whatever, God forbid, I hope someone will say, "He's up in Heaven now." Who really knows? I could have dreamed all this.My epitaph in any case? "Everything was beautiful. Nothing hurt." I will have gotten off so light, whatever the heck it is that was going on.

-KV, 'God Bless You Dr. Kevorkian'

I hope that Julie would agree that 'everything was beautiful, and that nothing hurt.' It didn't look that way to a lot of us, but if anyone could see it that way, it would be Julie.

Monday, July 7, 2008

Remembering Julie

I'd like to thank everyone for the condolences and for sharing your feelings and memories of Julie. I'd like to add a few pictures here from the memorial event a couple weeks ago, if anyone wants to send me some. I hope someone got a shot of the balloons.