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

close to healthy as I ever feel.

“Do the kinds 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.”

He coughed and reached for the small bell that lay on the chair. He had to poke a few times at it, and I finally picked it up and put it in his hand.

“Thank you,” he whispered. He shook it weakly, trying to get Connie’s attention.

“This Ted Turner guy,” Morrie said, “he couldn’t think of anything else for his tombstone?”

“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 Talk About How Love Goes On

The leaves had begun to change color, turning the ride through West Newton into a portrait of gold and rust. Back in Detroit, the labor war had stagnated, with each side accusing the other of failing to communicate. The stories on the TV news were just as depressing. In rural Kentucky, three men threw pieces of a tombstone off a bridge, smashing the windshield of a passing car, killing a teenage girl who was traveling with her family on a religious pilgrimage. In California, the O. J. Simpson trial was heading toward a conclusion, and the whole country seemed to be obsessed. Even in airports, there were hanging TV sets tuned to CNN so that you could get an O.J. update as you made your way to a gate.

I had tried calling my brother in Spain several times. I left messages saying that I really wanted to talk to him, that I had been doing a lot of thinking about us. A few weeks later, I got back a short message saying everything was okay, but he was sorry, he really didn’t feel like talk­ing about being sick.

For my old professor, it was not the talk of being sick but the being sick itself that was sinking him. Since my last visit, a nurse had inserted a catheter into his penis, which drew the urine out through a tube and into a bag that sat at the foot of his chair. His legs needed constant tending (he could still feel pain, even though he could not move them, another one of ALS’s cruel little ironies), and unless his feet dangled just the right number of inches off the foam pads, it felt as if someone were poking him with a fork. In the middle of conversations, Morrie would have to ask visitors to lift his foot and move it just an inch, or to adjust his head so that it fit more easily into the palm of the colored pillows. Can you imagine being unable to move your own head?

With each visit, Morrie seemed to be melting into his chair, his spine taking on its shape. Still, every morning he insisted on being lifted from his bed and wheeled to his study, deposited there among his books and papers and the hibiscus plant on the windowsill. In typical fashion, he found something philosophical in this.

“I sum it up in my newest aphorism,” he said. Let me hear it.

“When you’re in bed, you’re dead.”

He smiled. Only Morrie could smile at something like that.

He had been getting calls from the “Nightline” peo­ple and from Ted Koppel himself.

“They want to come and do another show with me,” he said. “But they say they want to wait.”

Until what? You’re on your last breath? “Maybe. Anyhow, I’m not so far away.” Don’t say that.

“I’m sorry.”

That bugs me, that they want to wait until you wither.

“It bugs you because you look out for me.”

He smiled. “Mitch, maybe they are using me for a little drama. That’s okay. Maybe I’m using them, too. They help me get my message to millions of people. I couldn’t do that without them, right? So it’s a compro­mise.”

He coughed, which turned into a long-drawn-out gargle, ending with another glob into a crushed tissue. “Anyhow,” Morrie said, “I told them they better not wait too long, because my voice won’t be there. Once this thing hits my lungs, talking may become impossible. I can’t speak for too long without needing a rest now. I have already canceled a lot of the people who want to see me. Mitch, there are so many. But I’m too fatigued. If I can’t give them the right attention, I can’t help them.” I looked at the tape recorder, feeling guilty, as if I were stealing what was left of his precious speaking time. “Should we skip it?” I asked. “Will it make you too tired?”

Morrie shut his eyes and shook his head. He seemed to be waiting for some silent pain to pass. “No,” he finally said. “You and I have to go on.

“This is our last thesis together, you know.” Our last thesis.

“We want to get it right.”

I thought about our first thesis together, in college. It was Morrie’s idea, of course. He told me I was good enough to write an honors project—something I had never considered.

Now here we were, doing the same thing once more. Starting with an idea. Dying man talks to living man, tells him what he should know. This time, I was in less of a hurry to finish.

“Someone asked me an interesting question yester­day,” Morrie said now, looking over my shoulder at the wallhanging behind me, a quilt of hopeful messages that friends had stitched for him on his seventieth birthday. Each patch on the quilt had a different message: Stay the Course, the Best Is Yet to Be, Morrie—Always No.1 in Mental Health!

What was the question? I asked.

“If I worried about being forgotten after I died?” Well? Do you?

“I don’t think I will be. I’ve got so many people who have been involved with me in close, intimate ways. And love is how you stay alive, even after you are gone.”

Sounds like a song lyric—“love is how you stay alive.”

Morrie chuckled. “Maybe. But, Mitch, all this talk that we’re doing? Do you ever hear my voice sometimes when you’re back home? When you’re all alone? Maybe on the plane? Maybe in your car?”

Yes, I admitted.

“Then you will not forget me after I’m gone. Think of my voice and I’ll be there.”

Think of your voice.

“And if you want to cry a little, it’s okay.”

Morrie. He had wanted to make me cry since I was a freshman. “One of these days, I’m gonna get to you,” he would say.

Yeah, yeah, I would answer.

“I decided what I wanted on my tombstone,” he said.

I don’t want to hear about tombstones. “Why? They make you nervous?”

I shrugged.

“We can forget it.”

No, go ahead. What did you decide?

Morrie popped his lips. “I was thinking of this: A Teacher to the Last.”

He waited while I absorbed it.

A Teacher to the Last.

“Good?” he said.

Yes, I said. Very good.

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.

“Ahhhh, it’s my buddy,” he would say when he saw me, in that foggy, high-pitched voice. And it didn’t stop with the greeting. 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 focused 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 to you. I am thinking about you.”

I remembered how he used to teach this idea in the Group Process class back at Brandeis. I had scoffed back then, thinking this was hardly a lesson plan for a university course. Learning to pay attention? How important could that be? I now know it is more important than almost everything they taught us in college.