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

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 far 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, a lover they’re daydreaming about. 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.”

Once you start running, I said, it’s hard to slow your­self down.

“Not so hard,” he said, shaking his head. “Do you know what I do? When someone wants to get ahead of me in traffic—when I used to be able to drive—I would raise my hand …”

He tried to do this now, but the hand lifted weakly, only six inches.

“… I would raise my hand, as if I was going to make a negative gesture, and then I would wave and smile. Instead of giving them the finger, you let them go, and you smile.

“You know what? A lot of times they smiled back. “The truth is, I don’t have to be in that much of a hurry with my car. I would rather put my energies into people.”

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. We are great at small talk: “What do you do?” “Where do you live?” 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. Despite his personal pain and decay, this little old man listened the way they always wanted someone to lis­ten.

I told him he was the father everyone wishes they had.

“Well,” he said, closing his eyes, “I have some experi­ence in that area …”

The last time Morrie saw his own father was in a city morgue. Charlie Schwartz was a quiet man who liked to read his newspaper, alone, under a streetlamp on Tremont Avenue in the Bronx. Every night, when Morrie was little, Charlie would go for a walk after dinner. He was a small Russian man, with a ruddy complexion and a full head of grayish hair. Morrie and his brother, David, would look out the window and see him leaning against the lamppost, and Morrie wished he would come inside and talk to them, but he rarely did. Nor did he tuck them in, nor kiss them good-night.

Morrie always swore he would do these things for his own children if he ever had any. And years later, when he had them, he did.

Meanwhile, as Morrie raised his own children, Char­lie was still living in the Bronx. He still took that walk. He still read the paper. One night, he went outside after din­ner. A few blocks from home, he was accosted by two robbers.

“Give us your money,” one said, pulling a gun. Frightened, Charlie threw down his wallet and began to run. He ran through the streets, and kept running until he reached the steps of a relative’s house, where he col­lapsed on the porch.

Heart attack.

He died that night.

Morrie was called to identify the body. He flew to New York and went to the morgue. He was taken down­ stairs, to the cold room where the corpses were kept.

“Is this your father?” the attendant asked.

Morrie looked at the body behind the glass, the body of the man who had scolded him and molded him and taught him to work, who had been quiet when Morrie wanted him to speak, who had told Morrie to swallow his memories of his mother when he wanted to share them with the world.

He nodded and he walked away. The horror of the room, he would later say, sucked all other functions out of him. He did not cry until days later.

Still, his father’s death helped prepare Morrie for his own. This much he knew: there would be lots of holding and kissing and talking and laughter and no good-byes left unsaid, all the things he missed with his father and his mother.

When the final moment came, Morrie wanted his loved ones around him, knowing what was happening. No one would get a phone call, or a telegram, or have to look through a glass window in some cold and foreign basement.

In the South American rain forest, there is a tribe called the Desana, who see the world as a fixed quantity of energy that flows between all creatures. Every birth must therefore engender a death, and every death bring forth another birth. This way, the energy of the world remains complete.

When they hunt for food, the Desana know that the ani­mals they kill will leave a hole in the spiritual well. But that hole will be filled, they believe, by the souls of the Desana hunters when they die. Were there no men dying, there would be no birds orfish being born. I like this idea. Morrie likes it, too. The closer he gets to good-bye, the more he seems to feel we are all creatures in the same forest. What we take, we must replenish.

“It’s only fair,” he says.

The Tenth Tuesday We Talk About Marriage

I brought a visitor to meet Morrie. My wife.

He had been asking me since the first day I came. “When do I meet Janine?” “When are you bringing her?” I’d always had excuses until a few days earlier, when I called his house to see how he was doing.

It took a while for Morrie to get to the receiver. And when he did, I could hear the fumbling as someone held it to his ear. He could no longer lift a phone by himself. “Hiiiiii,” he gasped.

You doing okay, Coach?

I heard him exhale. “Mitch … your coach … isn’t having such a great day …

His sleeping time was getting worse. He needed oxy­gen almost nightly now, and his coughing spells had be­ come frightening. One cough could last an hour, and he never knew if he’d be able to stop. He always said he would die when the disease got his lungs. I shuddered when I thought how close death was.

I’ll see you on Tuesday, I said. You’ll have a better day then.

“Mitch.”

Yeah?

“Is your wife there with you?” She was sitting next to me.

“Put her on. I want to hear her voice.”

Now, I am married to a woman blessed with far more intuitive kindness than I. Although she had never met Morrie, she took the phone –I would have shaken my head and whispered, “I’m not here! I’m not here!”—and in a minute, she was connecting with my old professor as if they’d known each other since college. I sensed this, even though all I heard on my end was “Uh-huh … Mitch told me … oh, thank you …

When she hung up, she said, “I’m coming next trip.” And that was that.

Now we sat in his office, surrounding him in his re­cliner. Morrie, by his own admission, was a harmless flirt, and while he often had to stop for coughing, or to use the commode, he seemed to find new reserves of energy with Janine in the room. He looked at photos from our wed­ding, which Janine had brought along.

“You are from Detroit?” Morrie said. Yes, Janine said.

“I taught in Detroit for one year, in the late forties. I remember a funny story about that.”

He stopped to blow his nose. When he fumbled with the tissue, I held it in place and he blew weakly into it. I squeezed it lightly against his nostrils, then pulled it off, like a mother does to a child in a car seat.

“Thank you, Mitch.” He looked at Janine. “My helper, this one is.”

Janine smiled.

“Anyhow. My story. There were a bunch of sociolo­gists at the university, and we used to play poker with other staff members, including this guy who was a sur­geon. One night, after the game, he said, ‘Morrie, I want to come see you work.’ I said fine. So he came to one of my classes and watched me teach.

“After the class was over he said, ‘All right, now, how would you like to see me work? I have an operation to­