God bless you, Dr. Kevorkian (13 page)

yesterday s

near-death experience, I chatted just inside the Pearly Gates with Roberta Gorsuch Burke, married for seventy-two years back here on Earth to Admiral A. Burke, Chief of Naval Operations from to

He led the navy into the Nuclear Age. She died last July at the age of ninety-eight. Admiral Burke, by then retired of course, died a year before that at the age of ninety-nine. They met on a blind date in

when he was in his first year at

the Naval Academy. On that date, she was a last minute substitute for her older sister. Fate. They married four years later. If past performance
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is any indication, they will surely stay married there at the far end of the blue tunnel throughout all eternity. She said to me, "Why fool around?" President Clinton told her at her husband's

when she still had a

year to live, "You have blessed America with your service and set an example not only for navy wives today, and to come, but for all Americans." The simple epitaph Roberta Gorsuch Burke chose for her tombstone here on Earth: "A Sailor's Wife."
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Jr. jack

Kevorkian

has again

unstrapped me from what has become my personal gurney, here, in the lethal injection facility at Texas. Jack has now supervised fifteen controlled near-death experiences for me. Hey, Jack, way to go! On this morning's trip down the blue tunnel to the pearly gates, Clarence Darrow, the great American defense attorney, dead for sixty years now, came looking for me. He wanted WNYC's listeners to hear his opinions of television cameras in courtrooms. "I welcome them," he said, if you can believe it. This man with the reputation of a giant, comes from a rinky dink little farm town in Ohio.