Tuesdays with Morrie: an old man, a young man, and life’s greatest lesson

“Oh, I guess I do.” He closed his eyes. “I envy them being able to go to the health club, or go for a swim. Or dance. Mostly for dancing. But envy comes to me, I feel it, and then I let it go. Remember what I said about detachment? Let it go. Tell yourself, ‘That’s envy, I’m going to separate from it now.’ And walk away.”

He coughed—a long, scratchy cough—and he pushed a tissue to his mouth and spit weakly into it. Sit­ting there, I felt so much stronger than he, ridiculously so, as if I could lift him and toss him over my shoulder like a sack of flour. I was embarrassed by this superiority, because I did not feel superior to him in any other way.

How do you keep from envying …

“What?”

Me?

He smiled.

“Mitch, it is impossible for the old not to envy the young. But the issue is to accept who you are and revel in that. This is your time to be in your thirties. I had my time to be in my thirties, and now is my time to be seventy- eight.

“You have to find what’s good and true and beautiful in your life as it is now. Looking back makes you compet­ itive. And, age is not a competitive issue.”

He exhaled and lowered his eyes, as if to watch his breath scatter into the air.

“The truth is, part of me is every age. I’m a three-­year-old, I’m a five-year-old, I’m a thirty-seven-year-old, I’m a fifty-year-old. I’ve been through all of them, and I know what it’s like. I delight in being a child when it’s appropriate to be a child. I delight in being a wise old man when it’s appropriate to be a wise old man. Think of all I can be! I am every age, up to my own. Do you understand?”

I nodded.

“How can I be envious of where you are—when I’ve been there myself?”

“Fate succumbs many a species: one alone jeopardises itself.”

W.H. Auden, Morrie’s favorite poet

The Eighth Tuesday We Talk About Money

I held up the newspaper so that Morrie could see it:

I Don’t Want My Tombstone To Read “I Never Owned a Network”

Morrie laughed, then shook his head. The morning sun was coming through the window behind him, falling on the pink flowers of the hibiscus plant that sat on the sill. The quote was from Ted Turner, the billionaire media mogul, founder of CNN, who had been lamenting his inability to snatch up the CBS network in a corporate megadeal. I had brought the story to Morrie this morning because I wondered if Turner ever found himself in my old professor’s position, his breath disappearing, his body turning to stone, his days being crossed off the calendar one by one—would he really be crying over owning a network?

“It’s all part of the same problem, Mitch,” Morrie said. “We put our values in the wrong things. And it leads to very disillusioned lives. I think we should talk about that.”

Morrie was focused. There were good days and bad days now. He was having a good day. The night before, he had been entertained by a local a cappella group that had come to the house to perform, and he relayed the story excitedly, as if the Ink Spots themselves had dropped by for a visit. Morrie’s love for music was strong even before he got sick, but now it was so intense, it moved him to tears. He would listen to opera sometimes at night, closing his eyes, riding along with the magnificent voices as they dipped and soared.

“You should have heard this group last night, Mitch. Such a sound!”

Morrie had always been taken with simple pleasures, singing, laughing, dancing. Now, more than ever, mate­ rial things held little or no significance. When people die, you always hear the expression “You can’t take it with you.” Morrie seemed to know that a long time ago.

“We’ve got a form of brainwashing going on in our country,” Morrie sighed. “Do you know how they brain­wash people? They repeat something over and over. And that’s what we do in this country. Owning things is good. More money is good. More property is good. More com­mercialism is good. More is good. More is good. We repeat it—and have it repeated to us—over and over until no­body bothers to even think otherwise. The average person is so fogged up by all this, he has no perspective on what’s really important anymore.

“Wherever I went in my life, I met people wanting to gobble up something new. Gobble up a new car. Gobble up a new piece of property. Gobble up the latest toy. And then they wanted to tell you about it. ‘Guess what I got? Guess what I got?’

“You know how I always interpreted that? These were people so hungry for love that they were accepting substitutes. They were embracing material things and ex­pecting a sort of hug back. But it never works. You can’t substitute material things for love or for gentleness or for tenderness or for a sense of comradeship.

“Money is not a substitute for tenderness, and power is not a substitute for tenderness. I can tell you, as I’m sitting here dying, when you most need it, neither money nor power will give you the feeling you’re looking for, no matter how much of them you have.”

I glanced around Morrie’s study. It was the same to­day as it had been the first day I arrived. The books held their same places on the shelves. The papers cluttered the same old desk. The outside rooms had not been improved or upgraded. In fact, Morrie really hadn’t bought any­thing new—except medical equipment—in a long, long time, maybe years. The day he learned that he was termi­nally ill was the day he lost interest in his purchasing power.

So the TV was the same old model, the car that Char­lotte drove was the same old model, the dishes and the silverware and the towels—all the same. And yet the house had changed so drastically. It had filled with love and teaching and communication. It had filled with friendship and family and honesty and tears. It had filled with colleagues and students and meditation teachers and therapists and nurses and a cappella groups. It had be­come, in a very real way, a wealthy home, even though Morrie’s bank account was rapidly depleting.

“There’s a big confusion in this country over what we want versus what we need,” Morrie said. “You need food, you want a chocolate sundae. You have to be honest with yourself. You don’t need the latest sports car, you don’t need the biggest house.

“The truth is, you don’t get satisfaction from those things. You know what really gives you satisfaction?” What?

“Offering others what you have to give.”

You sound like a Boy Scout.

“I don’t mean money, Mitch. I mean your time. Your concern. Your storytelling. It’s not so hard. There’s a se­ nior center that opened near here. Dozens of elderly peo­ple come there every day. If you’re a young man or young woman and you have a skill, you are asked to come and teach it. Say you know computers. You come there and teach them computers. You are very welcome there. And they are very grateful. This is how you start to get respect, by offering something that you have.

“There are plenty of places to do this. You don’t need to have a big talent. There are lonely people in hospitals and shelters who only want some companionship. You play cards with a lonely older man and you find new respect for yourself, because you are needed. “Remember what I said about finding a meaningful life? I wrote it down, but now I can recite it: Devote yourself to loving others, devote yourself to your commu­nity around you, and devote yourself to creating some­thing that gives you purpose and meaning.

“You notice,” he added, grinning, “there’s nothing in there about a salary.”

I jotted some of the things Morrie was saying on a yellow pad. I did this mostly because I didn’t want him to see my eyes, to know what I was thinking, that I had been, for much of my life since graduation, pursuing these very things he had been railing against—bigger toys, nicer house. Because I worked among rich and famous athletes, I convinced myself that my needs were realistic, my greed inconsequential compared to theirs.

This was a smokescreen. Morrie made that obvious. “Mitch, if you’re trying to show off for people at the top, forget it. They will look down at you anyhow. And if you’re trying to show off for people at the bottom, forget it. They will only envy you. Status will get you nowhere. Only an open heart will allow you to float equally be­tween everyone.”

He paused, then looked at me. “I’m dying, right?” Yes.

“Why do you think it’s so important for me to hear other people’s problems? Don’t I have enough pain and suffering of my own?

“Of course I do. But giving to other people is what makes me feel alive. Not my car or my house. Not what I look like in the mirror. When I give my time, when I can make someone smile after they were feeling sad, it’s as