Simplify the following text for a Grade 7 native English-speaking person.
Original: In Slapstick , Vonnegut recounts that Alice 's husband died two days before Alice herself , and her family tried to hide the knowledge from her , but she found out when an ambulatory patient gave her a copy of the New York Daily News a day before she herself died .
Simplified: In his novel Slapstick , Vonnegut told how Alice 's husband had died two days before she did .