Tuesday with Morrie

  The following is a review as well as extracts from the book.  I felt that the content and the topic of this book is truly excellent that to date (Jun '03) I have given out 8 copies to my friends.  Hope the extracts would entice you to go grab the book.  Go down to the library and grab it or drop me a mail and I will only gladly buy you one with one condition --  "If you find it meaningful, pass it on!"

The Syllabus

     Morrie was diagnosed with amyotrohphic lateral sclerosis (ALS), Lou Gehrig’s disease, a brutal, unforgiving illness of the neurological system.

    ALS is like a lit candle: it melts your nerves and leaves your body a pile of wax.  Often, it begins with the legs and works its way up.  You lose control of your thigh muscles, so that you cannot support yourself standing.  You lose control of your trunk muscles, so that you cannot sit up straight.  By the end, if you are still alive, you are breathing through a tube in a hole in your throat, while your soul, perfectly awake, is imprisoned inside a limp husk, perhaps able to blink, or cluck a tongue, like something from a science fiction movie, the man frozen inside his own flesh.  This takes no more than 5 years from the day you contract disease.

     Instead of succumbing to the disease literally, Morrie made a profound decision, he decides to make death his final project, the centre point of his day.  Since everyone was going to die, he could be grate value, right?  He could be a research.  A human textbook.  Study me in my slow and patient demise.  Watch what happens to me.  Learn with me.

     Morrie would walk that bridge between life and death, and narrate the trip.

     Morrie weakened so much that walking to and fro the toilet became too much for him and he had to urinate into a beaker.  He had to do this with people’s assistance, even those who visited him, he sometimes asked of them to assist.

     He entertained a growing steams of visitors and told his friends that if they really wanted to help him, they would treat him not with sympathy but with visits, phone calls, a sharing of their problems – the way they had always shared their problems, because Morrie had always been a good listener.

     He once attended a funeral and came back depressed because he felt that it’s a pity the person who died didn’t hear those that is said about him.  This led him to hold a “living funeral” and invited his friends to talk about him. 

 This project was a rousing success and the unusual part of his life unfolds following it.

The Student

     Lost contact with most people I know after graduation.  The years after graduation hardened me into someone quite different from the strutting graduate who left campus that day headed for New York City, ready to offer the world his talent..

     The world I discovered was not at all interesting.  I aspired to be a musician, performed in clubs and form and broke up many bands.  Nothing went right for me. Had first serious encounter with death, the uncle that taught me music and everything in life, passed away.

     After his funeral, my life changed.   I felt as if time was suddenly precious, water going down an open drain, and I could not move quickly enough.  No more playing music at half-empty nightclubs.  No more writing songs in my apartment, songs that no one would hear.  I returned to school and earn a masters degree in journalism and found a job in that field.  I am determined no to end up like my uncle who works 9 to 5 for a corporation and hated it.

     I later became successful, found a woman and got married after a 7-year courtship.  Told her that we will start a family but that day never came to my career.  I buried myself in accomplishments because with accomplishments, I believed I could control things, I could squeeze in every last piece of happiness before I got sick and died, like my uncle before me, which I figured was my natural fate.

    Though about Morrie time and then, about his “being human” and “relating to others”.   Didn’t know about Morrie’s illness until watching a TV programme one night.

The AudioVisual

     Morrie’s philosophy was that death should not be embarrassing.  He said, “when all this started, I asked myself, ‘Am I going to withdraw from the world, like most people do, or am I going to live?’  I decided I’m going to live – or at least try to live – the way I want, with dignity, with courage, with humor, with composure.

   “There are some mornings when I cry and cry and mourn for myself.  Some mornings, I’m so angry and bitter.  But it doesn’t last too long.  Then I get up and say, ‘I want to live . . .’

The Orientation

The Classroom

     Morrie said to Mitch: “Dying is only one thing to be sad over.  Living unhappily is something else.  So many of the people who came to visit me are unhappy.”

   Mitch:  “Why”

    Morrie: “Well, for one thing, the culture we have does not make people feel good about themselves.  We’re teaching the wrong things.  And you have to be strong enough to say if the culture doesn’t work, don’t buy it.  Create your own.  Most people can’t do it.  They’re more unhappy than me – even in my current condition. “I may be dying, but I am surrounded by loving, caring souls.  How many people can say that?”

   I (Mitch) was astonished by his complete lack of self-pity.  Morrie, who could no longer dance, swim, bathe, or walk…. Etc, and yet I could not deny that sitting in his presence was almost magically serene, the same calm breeze that soothed me back in college.

 Taking Attendance

     Why did we bother with all the distractions that we did?  Why did so many people get so addicted to someone else’s drama?

    I remembered what Morrie said during our visit: “Well, for one thing, the culture we have does not make people feel good about themselves.  We’re teaching the wrong things.  And you have to be strong enough to say if the culture doesn’t work, don’t buy it.”

    Morrie, true to these words, had developed his own culture – long before he got sick.  Discussion groups, walks with friends, dancing to his music in the Harvard Square church.  He started a project called Greenhouse, where poor people could receive mental health services.  H read books to find new ideas for his classes, visited with colleagues, kept up with old students, wrote letters to distant friends.  He took more time eating and looking a nature and wasted no time in front of TV sitcoms or “Movies of the week.”   He had created a cocoon of human activities – conversation, interaction, affection – and it filled his life like an overflowing soup bowl.

     Morrie said: “So many people walk around with a meaningless life.  They seem half-asleep, even when they’re busy doing things they think are important.  This is because they’re chasing the wrong things.  They way you get meaning into your life is to devote yourself to loving others, devote yourself to your community around you, and devote yourself to creating something that gives you purpose and meaning.

     Back in Detroit, I learned that my union went on strike.  As I was a member of the union, it meant that I am out of work.  I felt confused and depressed as the newspaper had been my lifeline, my oxygen; when I say in my stories in print in each morning, I knew that, in at least one way, I was alive.  The strike drags on and I still saw sport news from other newspapers.  I was stunned at how easily things went on without me (a sports news reporter).

The First Tuesday We Talk About the World

 …..

     As Connie took the plates away, I noticed a stack of newspaper that had obviously been read before I got there.

    You bothered keeping up with the news, I asked?

    “Yes,” Morrie said.  “Do you think that’s strange? I asked?   Do you think because I am dying, I shouldn’t care what happens in his world?

 ….

   “But it’s hard to explain, Mitch.  Now that I’m suffering, I feel closer to people who suffer than I ever did before.  The other night, on TV, I saw people in Bosnia running across the street, getting fired upon, killed, innocent victims and I just started to cry.  I feel their anguish as if it were my own.  I don’t know any of these people.  But – how can I put this? – I’m almost … drawn to them.”

    . . .

     “Mitch, you asked about caring for people I don’t even know.  But can I tell you the thing I’m learning most with this disease?”

     “What’s that?”

     “The most important thing in life is to learn how to give out love, and to let it come in.”

     His voice dropped into a whisper.  “Let it come in.  We think we don’t deserve love, we think if we let it in we’ll become too soft.  But a wise men named Levine said it right.  He said, ‘Love is the only rational act.’”

The Second Tuesday We Talk About Feeling Sorry for Yourself

     Morrie: “Sometimes, in the mornings that’s when I mourn.  I feel around my body, I move my fingers and my hands – whatever I can still move – and I mourn what I’ve lost.  I mourn the slow, insidious way in which I’m dying.  But then I stop mourning.”

     Mitch: “Just like that?”

    Morrie:” I give myself a good cry if I need it.  But then I concentrate on all the good things still in my life.  On the people who are coming to see me.  On the stories I’m going to hear.  On you – if it’s Tuesday.  Because we’re Tuesday people”

     Morrie: “Mitch, I don’t allow myself any more self-pity than that.  A little each morning, a few tears, and that’s all.”

    I (Mitch) thought about all the people I knew who spent many of their waking hours feeling sorry for themselves.  How useful it would be to put a daily limit on self-pity.  Just a few tearful minutes, then on with the day.  And if Morrie could do it, with such a horrible disease….

     “It’s only horrible if you see it that way,”  Morrie said. “It’s horrible to watch my body slowly wilt away to nothing.  But it’s also wonderful because of all the time I get to say good-bye.”

   He smiled.  “Not everyone is so lucky”

 Recollections:-

     It is my junior year, 1978, when disco and Rocky movies are the cultural rage.  We are in an unusual sociology class at Brandeis, something Morrie calls “Group Process.”  Each week we study the ways in which the students in the group interact with one another, how they respond to anger, jealousy, attention.  We are human lab rats.  More often than not, someone ends up crying.  I refer to it as the “touchy-feely” course.  Morrie says I should be more open-minded.

    On this day, Morrie says he has an exercise for us to try.  We are to stand, facing away from our classmates, and fall backward, relying on another student to catch us.  Most of us are uncomfortable with this, and we cannot let go for more than a few inches before stopping ourselves.  We laugh in embarrassment.

    Finally, one student, a thin, quiet, dark-haired girl whom I notice almost wears bulky white fisherman sweaters, crosses her arms over her chest, closes her eyes, leans back, and does not flinch, like one of those Lipton tea commercials where the model splashes into the pool.

    For a moment, I am sure she is going to thump on the floor.  A the last instant, her assigned partner grabs her head and shoulders and yanks her up harshly.

    “Whoa!” several students yelled.  Some clap.

    Morrie finally smiles.

      “You see,” he says to the girl, ‘you closed your eyes.  That was the difference.  Sometimes you cannot believe what you see, you have to believe what you feel.  And if you are ever going to have other people trust you, you must feel that you can trust them, too – even when you’re in the dark.  Even when you’re falling.”

The Third Tuesday We Talk About Regrets

     The first time I was Morrie on “Nightline,”  I wondered what regrets he had once he knew his death was imminent.  Did he lament lost friends?  Would he have done much differently?  Selfishly, I wondered if I was in his shoes, would I be consumed with sad thoughts of all that I had missed?  Would I regret the secrets I had kept hidden?

     When I mentioned this to Morrie, he nodded.  “It’s what everyone worries about, isn’t it?  What if today was my last day on earth?  He studied my face, and perhaps he saw an ambivalence about my own choices.  I had this vision of me keeling over at my desk one day, halfway through a story, my editors snatching the copy even as the medics carried my body away.

     “Mitch,” he said, “the culture doesn’t encourage you to think about such things until you’re about to die.  We’re so wrapped up with egotistical things, career, family , having enough money, meeting the mortgage, getting a new car, fixing the radiator when it breaks – we’re involved in trillions of little acts just to keep going.  So we don’t get into the habit of standing back and looking at our lives and saying, is this all?  Is this all I want?  Is something missing?”

     He paused.

     “You need someone to probe you in that direction.  It won’t just happen automatically.”

    I knew what he was saying.  We all need teachers in our lives.

The AudioVisual, Part Two

 … …

     Morrie read out a mail he has received from a schoolteacher in Pennsylvania who taught a special class of nine children; every child in the class had suffered the death of a parent, after she has seen the first “Nightline” program.

     He told them what he wrote back.  “Dear Babara… I was moved by your letter.  I feel the work you have done with the children who have lost a parent is very important.  I also lost a parent at an early age…  “  He began to break down and continued. “ ‘I lost my mother when I was a child . . . and it was quite a blow to me . . . I wish I’d had a group like yours where I would have been able to talk about my sorrows.  I would have joined your group because . . .’ “… because I was so lonely…”

     “Morrie,”  Koppel said, “that was seventy years ago you mother died.  The pain still goes on?”

    “You bet,”  Morrie whispered.

The Professor

     “A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell where his influence stops.” – Henry Adams

The Fourth Tuesday We Talked About Death

     Morrie: “Everyone knows they’re going to die but nobody believes it.  If we did, we would do things differently.”

     Mitch: So we kid ourselves about death, I said.

     Morrie: “Yes.  But there’s a better approach.  To know you’re going to die, and to be prepared for it at any time.  That’s better.  That way you can actually be more involved in your life while you’re living.”

     Mitch: “How can you ever be prepared to die?”

     Morrie:  “Do what the Buddhists do.  Every day, have a little bird on your shoulder that asks, ‘Is today the day? Am I ready?  Am I doing all I need to do?  Am I being the person I want to be?”

     Morrie:  “The truth is, Mitch, once you  learn how to die, you will learn how to live.”

    But everyone knows someone who has died, I said.  Why is it so hard to think about dying?

      “Because, Morrie continued,”most of us all walk around us as if we’re sleepwalking.  We really don’t experience the world fully because we’re half-asleep, doing things we automatically think we have to do.

    And facing death changes all that?

      “Oh, yes.  You strip away all that stuff and you focus on the essentials.  When you realize you are going to die, you see everything much differently.

     … …

  “Well, the truth is, if you really listen to that bird on your shoulder, if you accept that you can die at any time – then you might not be as ambitious as you are.”

    I forced a small grin.

     “The things you spend so much time on – all this work you do – might not seem as important.  You might have to make room for some more spiritual things.”

    Spiritual things?

     … …

    “Mitch,” even I don’t know what ‘spiritual development’ really means.  But I do know we’re deficient in some way.  We are too involved in materialistic things, and they don’t satisfy us.  The loving relationships we have, the universe around us, we take these things for granted.

The Fifth Tuesday We Talk About Family

    “The fact is, there is no foundation, no secure ground, upon which people may stand today if it isn’t the family.  It’s become quite clear to me as I’ve been sick.  If you don’t have the support and love and caring and concern that you get from a family, you don’t have much at all.  Love is so supremely important.  As our great poet Auden said, ‘Love each other or perish.’”

     “This is part of what a family is about, not just love, but letting others know there’s someone who is watching out for them.  It’s what I missed so much when my mother died – what I call your ‘spiritual security’ – knowing that you family will be there watching out for you.   Nothing else will give you that.  Not money.  Not fame.”

     “Whenever people ask me about having children or not having children, I never tell them what to do,”  “I simply say, there is no experience like having children.  That’s all.  There is not substitute for it.  You cannot do it with a friend.  You cannot do it with a lover.  If you want the experience of having complete responsibility for another human being, and to learn how to love and bond in the deepest way, then you should have children.”

The Sixth Tuesday We Talk About Emotions.

     Morrie: “Detachment doesn’t mean you don’t let the experience penetrate you.  On the contrary, you let it penetrate you fully.  That’s how you are able to leave it.”

     “Take any emotion – love for a woman, or grief for a loved one, or what I’m going through, fear and pain from a deadly illness.  If you hold back on the emotions – if you don’t allow yourself to go all the way through them – you can never get to being detached, you’re too busy being afraid.  You are afraid of the pain, you’re afraid of the grief.  You’re afraid of the vulnerability that loving entails.

    “But by throwing yourself into these emotions, by allowing yourself to dive in, all the way, over your head eve, you experience them fully and completely.  You know what pain is.  You know what love is.  You know what grief is.  And only then can you say, ‘All right.  I have experienced that emotion.  I recognize that emotion.  Now I need to detach from that emotion for a moment.

     I thought about how often this was needed in every day life.  How we feel lonely, sometimes to the point of tears, but we don’t let those tears come because we are not supposed to cry.  Or how we feel a surge of love for a partner but we don’t say anything because we’re frozen with the fear of what those words might do to the relationship.

      Morrie’s approach was exactly the opposite.  Turn on the faucet.  Wash yourself with the emotion.  It won’t hurt you.  It will only help.  If you let the fear inside, if you pull it on like a familiar shirt, then you can say to yourself, “All right, it’s just fear, I don’t have to let it control me.  I see it for what it is”

      Same for loneliness: you let go, let the tears flow, feel it completely – but eventually be able to say, “All right, that was my moment with loneliness.   I’m not afraid of feeling lonely, but now I’m going to put that loneliness aside and know that there are other emotions in the world, and I’m going to experience them as well.”

The Professor, Part Two

     Morrie observed that most of the patients at the mental hospital had been rejected and ignored in their lives, made to feel that they didn’t exist.  They also missed compassion – something the staff ran out of quickly.  And many of these patients were well off, from rich families, so their wealth did not buy them happiness or contentment.  It was a lesson he never forgot.

      Morrie’s classes:  They chose discussions over lectures, experience over theory.

The Seventh Tuesday We Talk About the Fear of Aging

   Morrie said: “All this emphasis on youth (physical aspects of it) – I don’t buy it.”  “Listen, I know what a misery being young can be, so don’t tell me it’s so great.  All these kids who came to me with their struggles, their strife, their feelings or inadequacy, their sense that life was miserable, so bad thy wanted to kill themselves. . .

    “And in addition to all the miseries, the young are not wise.  They have very little understanding about life.  Who wants to live every day when you don’t know what’s going on?  When people are manipulating you, telling you to buy this perfume and you’ll be beautiful, or this pair of jeans and you’ll be sexy – and you believe them! It’s such nonsense.”

   Weren’t you ever afraid to grow old, I asked?”

    “Mitch, I embrace aging.”

    Embrace it?”

      “It’s very simple.  As you grow, you learn more.  If you stayed at twenty-two, you’d always be as ignorant as you were at twenty-two.  Aging is not just decay, you know.  It’s growth.  It’s more than negative that you are going to die, it’s also the positive that you understand you’re going to die, and that you live a better life because of it”

      “Yes, I said, but If aging were so valuable, why do people always say, “Oh, if I were young again.”  You never hear people say, “I wish I were 65.”

      He smiled.  “You know what that reflects?  Unsatisfied lives.  Unfulfilled lives.  Lives that haven’t found meaning.  Because if you’ve found meaning in your life, you don’t want to go back.  You want to go forward.  You want to see more, do more.  You can’t wait till 65.”

     “Fate succumbs many a species: one alone jeopardizes itself.: -- W.H.Auden, Morrie’s Favorite poet.

The Eighth Tuesday We Talked About Money

     Money won’t get you true satisfaction.

     You know what really gives you satisfaction?  --- “Offering others what you have to give”  (eg. Your time)

     “Do the kind of things that come from the heart.  When you do, you won’t be dissatisfied, you won’t be envious, you won’t be longing for somebody else’s things.  On the contrary, you’ll be overwhelmed with what comes back.”

     “Each night, when I go to sleep, I die.  And the next morning, when I wake up, I am reborn” – Mahatma Gandhi

The Ninth Tuesday We Talked About How Life Goes on

     I came to love the way Morrie lit up when I entered the room.  He did this for many people, I know, but it was his special talent to make each visitor feel that the smile was unique.

      When Morrie was with you, he was really with you.  He looked you straight in the eye, and he listened as if you were the only person in the world.  How much better would people get along if their first encounter each day were like this – instead of a grumble from a waitress or a bus driver or a boss?

    “I believe in being fully present,”  Morrie said.  “That means you should be with the person you’re with.  When I’m talking to you now, Mitch, I try to keep focussed only on what is going on between us.  I am not thinking about something we said last week.  I am not thinking of what’s coming up this Friday.  I am not thinking about doing another Koppel show, or about what medications I’m taking.  “I am talking with you.  I am thinking about you.”

     I remembered how he used to teach about “Learning to pay attention” in college.

     Morrie motioned for my hand, and as I gave it to him, I felt a surge of guilt.  Here was a man who, if he wanted, could spend every waking moment in self-pity, feeling his body for decay, counting his breaths.  So many people with smaller problems are so self-absorbed, their eyes glaze over if you speak for more than thirty seconds.  They already have something else in mind – a friend to call, a fax to send etc.  They only snap back to full attention when you finish talking, at which point they say “Uh-huh” or “Yeah, really” and fake their way back to the moment.

     “Part of the problem, Mitch, is that everyone is in such a hurry,” Morrie said.  “People haven’t found meaning in their lives, so they’re running all the time looking for it.  They think the next car, the next house, the next job.  Then they find those things are empty, too, and they keep running.”

      He did this better than anyone I’d ever known.  Those who sat with him saw his eyes go moist when they spoke about something horrible, or crinkle in delight when they told him a really bad joke.  He was always ready to openly  display the emotion so often missing from my baby boomer generation.      But really listening to someone – without trying to sell them something, pick them up, recruit them, or get some kind of status in return – how often do we get this anymore?  I believe many visitors in the last few months of Morrie’s life were drawn not because of the attention they wanted to pay to him but because of the attention he paid to them.

The Tenth Tuesday We Talk About Marriage

     … … Marriage.  Almost everyone I knew had a problem with it.  Some had problems getting on it, some had problems getting on it, some had problems getting out.  My generation seemed to struggle with the commitment, as if it were an alligator from some murky swamp. … …

      Why do we have such problems?  I wondered if people my age were being more careful than those who came before us, or simply more selfish?

      Well, I feel sorry for your generation, Morrie said.  “In this culture, it’s so important to find a loving relationship with someone because so much of the culture does not give you that.  But the poor kids today, either they’re too selfish to take part in a real loving relationship, or they rush into marriage and then six months later, they get divorced.  They don’t know what they want in a partner.  They don’t know who they are themselves – so how can they know who they’re marrying?”

      He sighed.  Morrie had counseled so many unhappy lovers in his years as a professor.  “It’s sad, because a loved one is so important.  You realize that, especially when you’re in a time like I am, when you’re not doing so well.  Friends are great, but friends are not going to be here on a night when you’re coughing and can’t sleep and someone has to sit up all night with you, comfort you, try to be helpful.” … …

      “I’ve learned this much about marriage,” he said now.  “You get tested.  You find out who you are, who the other person is, and how you accommodate or don’t.”

      Is there some kind of rule to know if a marriage is going to work?

     Morrie smiled.  “Things are not that simple, Mitch.”

      I know.

      “Still,” he said, “there are a few rules I know to be true about love and marriage:  If you don’t respect the other person, you’re gonna have a lot of trouble.  If you don’t know how to compromise, you’re gonna have a lot of trouble.  If you can’t talk openly about what goes on between you, you’re gonna have a lot of trouble.  And if you don’t have a common set of values in life, you’re gonna have a lot of trouble.  You values must be alike.

      “And the biggest one of those values, Mitch?”

      Yes?

      “Your belief in the importance of your marriage.”

      “Personally,” he sighed, “I think marriage is a very important thing to do, and you’re missing a hell of a lot if you don’t try it.”

The Eleventh Tuesday We Talk About Our Culture

     Morrie believed in the inherent good of people.  But he also saw what they could become.

      “People are only mean when they’re threatened,” he said later that day, “and that’s  what our culture does.  That’s what our economy does.  Even people who have jobs in our economy are threatened, because they worry about losing them.  And when you get threatened, you start looking out only for yourself.  You start making money a god.  It is all part of this culture.”

    He exhaled. “Which is why I don’t buy into it.”

    “Here’s what I mean by building you own little culture,”  Morrie said.  “I don’t mean you disregard every rule of your community.  But the big things – how we think, what we value – those you must choose yourself.  You can’t let any one – or any society – determine those for you.

      I asked Morrie why he hadn’t moved somewhere else when he was younger.

      “Every society has its own problems,” Morrie said, lifting his eyebrows, the closest he could come to a shrug.,  “The way to do it, I think, isn’t to run away.  You have to work at creating your own culture.

      “Look, no matter where you live, the biggest defect we human beings have is our shortsightedness.  We don’t see what we could be.  We should be looking at our potential, stretching ourselves into everything we can become.  But if you’re surrounded by people who say ‘I want mine now,’ you end up with a few people with everything and a military go keep the poor ones from rising up and stealing it.”

    “The problem, Mitch, is that we don’t believe we are as much alike as we are.  Whites and blacks, Catholics and Protestants, men and women.  If we saw each other as more alike, we might be very eager to join in one big human family in this world, and to care about that family the way we care about our own.

      “But believe me, when you are dying, you see it is true.  We have all the same beginning – birth – and we have the same end – death.  So how different can we be?

      “Invest in the human family.  Invest in people.  Build a little community of those you love and who love you.

      “In the beginning of life, when we are infants, we need others to survive, right?  And at end of life, when you get like me, you need others to survive, right?”

      His voice dropped to a whisper. “But here’s the secret: in between, we need others as well.”

The Audio Visual Part 3

     “For me, Ted, living means I can be responsive to the other person.  It means I can show my emotions and my feelings.  Talk to them.  Feel with them . . . “

     He exhaled.  “When that is gone, Morrie is gone.”

      “Be compassionate,” Morrie whispered. “And take responsibility for each other.  If we only learned those lessons, this world would be so much better a place.”

The Twelfth Tuesday We Talk About Forgiveness

    “Forgive yourself before you die.  Then forgive others.”

     “Mitch,” he said, returning to the subject of forgiveness.  “There is no point in keeping vengeance or stubbornness.  These things” – he sighed – “these things I so regret in my life.  Pride. Vanity.  Why do we do the things we do?”

   The importance of forgiving was my question…..

    Morrie nodded.  “Do you see that sculpture?”  He tilted his head toward a bust that sat high on a shelf against the far wall of his office. Cast in bronze, it was the face of a man in his early forties, wearing a necktie, a tuft of hair falling across his forehead.

    “That’s me,” Morrie said.  “A friend of mine sculpted that maybe thirty years ago.  His name was Norman.  We used to spend so much time together.  Once he had me over to his house in Cambridge, and he sculpted that bust of me down in his basement.  It took him several weeks to do it, but he really wanted to get it right.”

     “Well, here’s the sad part of the story,”  Morrie said. “Norman and his wife moved away to Chicago.  A little while later, my wife had to have a pretty serious operation.  Norman and his wife never got in touch with us.  I know they knew about it.  Charlotte and I were very hurt because they never called to see how she was.  So we dropped the relationship.

    “Over the years, I met Norman a few times and he always tried to reconcile, but I didn’t accept it.  I wasn’t satisfied with his explanation.  I was prideful.  I shrugged him off.”

      His voice choked.

      “Mitch . . . a few years ago . . . he died of cancer.  I feel so sad.  I never got to see him.  I never got to forgive.  It pains me now so much . . .”

      “It’s not just other people we need to forgive, Mitch,” he finally whispered.  We also need to forgive ourselves.”

      Ourselves?

      “Yes.  For all the things we didn’t do.  All the things we should have done.  You can’t get stuck on the regrets of what should have happened.  That doesn’t help you when you get to where I am.

     “I always wished I had done more with my work; I wished I had written more books.  I used to beat myself up over it.  Now I see that never did any good.  Make peace.  You need to make peace with yourself and everyone around you.”

    “Forgive yourself.  Forgive others.  Don’t wait,  Mitch.  Not everyone gets the time I’m getting.  Not everyone is as lucky”

    Lucky?

      “I mourned my dwindling time, but I cherish the chance it gives me to make things right.”

The Thirteenth Tuesday We Talk About the Perfect Day

    “Last night . . .”  Morrie said softly.

     Yes? Last night?

     “. . . I had a terrible spell.  It went on for hours.  And I really wasn’t sure I was going to make it.  No breath.  No end to the choking.  At one point, I started to get dizzy. . . and then I felt a certain peace, I felt that I was ready to go.”

    His eyes widened.  “Mitch, it was a most incredible feeling.  The sensation of accepting what was happening, being at peace.  I was thinking about a dream I had last week, where I was crossing a bridge into something unknown.  Being ready to move on to whatever is next.”

     But you didn’t.

     Morrie waited a moment.  He shoke his head slightly.  “No, I didn’t.  But I felt that I could.  Do you understand?

    “That’s what we’re looking for.  A certain peace with the idea of dying.  If we know, in the end, that we can ultimately have that peace with dying, then we can finally do the really hard thing.”

    Which is?

      “Make peace with living.”

      “As long as we can love each other, and remember the feeling of love we had, we can die without ever really going away.  All the love you created is still there.  All the memories are still there.  You live on – in the hearts of everyone you have touched and nurtured while you were here.”

      “Death ends a life, not a relationship.”

     …  If someone would wave a magic wand and make him you better, would he become, in time, the man he had been before?

    He shoke his head.  “No way I could go back, I am a different self now.  I’m different in my attitudes.  I’m different appreciating my body, which I didn’t do fully before.  I’m different in terms of trying to grapple with the big questions, the ultimate questions, the ones that won’t go away.

    “That’s the thing, you see.  Once you get your fingers on the important questions, you can’t turn away from them.”

   And what are the important questions?

     “As I see it, they have to do with love, responsibility, spirituality, awareness.  And if I were healthy today, those would still be my issues.  They should have been all along.”

     …. …

      Morrie asked Mitch about his brother, as if he knew that he was trying to contact his brother to let him see him to no avail…

      Morrie I said.  Why doesn’t he want to see me?

      My old professor sighed.  “There is no formula to relationships.  They have to be negotiated in loving ways, with room for both parties, what they want and what they need, what they can do and what their life is like.

    “In business, people negotiate to win.  They negotiate to get what they want.  Love is different.  Love is when you are as concerned about someone else’s situation as you are about your own.

The Fourteenth Tuesday We said Good-bye.

Conclusion

     I look back sometimes at the person I was before I rediscovered my old professor.  I want to talk to that person.  I want to tell him what to look out for, what mistakes to avoid.  I want to tell him to be more open, to ignore the lure of advertised values, to pay attention when your loved ones are speaking, as if it were the last time you might hear them.

     Mostly I want to tell that person to get on an airplane and visit a gentle old man in West Newton, Massachusetts, sooner rather than later, before that old man gets sick and loses his ability to dance.

     I know I cannot do this.  None of us can undo what we’ve done., or relive a life already recorded.  But if Professor Morris Schwartz taught me anything at all, it was this:  there is no such thing as “too late” in life.  He was changing until the day he said good-bye.

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