Issue/Publication: Burbank Leader (and syndicated to other community newspapers)

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Shakespeare was, obviously, a great writer. But his words don't follow me. They remain on the page, right there were I left them when I stopped reading. Robert Louis Stevenson touched me at a young age, implanting vivid permanent images in my mind. But he didn't change it. Homer helped mold the modern world, but he didn't mold me. None of these writers assembled strings of words that would in turn help assemble me.

Only Kurt Vonnegut did that.

Vonnegut died last week at the up-yours-I'm-still-smoking age of 84. No one could claim to be surprised. He had been saying his goodbyes for a very long time. There was the title of his 2001 book, "God Bless You, Dr. Kevorkian." There was his announcement two years ago that he would he would sue the makers of Pall Mall cigarettes because, "On the package they promise to kill me and they still haven't done it."

I tried to brace myself for his death. I learned only recently what happens when someone important to you dies. They leave a hole your world, a little tear in its fabric. For example, when I face north, something in the right side of my brain tells me that, somewhere over there, far beyond the horizon in a state called Virginia is the spot where my dad is supposed to be. But he's gone. So there's a hole now somewhere over there, like a single puzzle piece missing from a mostly complete picture.

I knew that, barring any Vonnegut-esque tragedy such as my ingestion of a substance that instantly turned me to ice, Vonnegut would beat me to the grave. And I knew what it would mean.

I hate clichés. I hate that the reigning philosophers in our modern world are television writers who pump us full of sap like, "They're not dead as long as we remember them."  On the contrary, he's quite dead. But as a metaphor, I'll admit there's some value in this cliché.

Vonnegut taught me that the American "truth" that anyone can become wealthy is not just a lie but a divide-and-conquer lie that turns our anger and blame inward. He showed me what the world could look like if we all evolved back into the sea. He took me inside the heart of a Nazi sympathizer to show me the dangers in my own heart.

When I was on a panel at last year's Los Angeles Times Festival of Books and an aspiring writer asked how you find your voice, the first words that came to my mind were Vonnegut's. Somewhere I had read he writes to one person and one person only -- his dead sister, Alice.

Vonnegut taught me about my own relationship with Alcoholics Anonymous -- that of an extended family. He helped me enjoy smoking to its fullest until I quit, at which time, miraculously, his words helped me give it up for good. He taught me that faraway beautiful sirens are sometimes mere illusion. He let me taste the smoky sweet syrup he made for pregnant women in a factory in Germany after he survived a firebombing there. He taught me that, to learn to identify a great painting, all I had to do was look at a whole lot of paintings.

He taught me not to muzzle that little voice inside that sometimes says this world is insane and its values dead wrong.

Vonnegut helped create the fabric of my world -- helped weave it. So the little hole he has now left in it -- a hole with the round shape and crusty edges of a cigarette burn-- is a price I'm willing to pay. Bless you, Mr. Vonnegut.

 June Casagrande is author of "Grammar Snobs Are Great Big Meanies."  She can be reached at junetcn@aol.com.