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

breath­ing.

I put the food I had brought with me into the refrig­erator—soup, vegetable cakes, tuna salad. I apologized to Charlotte for bringing it. Morrie hadn’t chewed food like this in months, we both knew that, but it had become a small tradition. Sometimes, when you’re losing someone, you hang on to whatever tradition you can.

I waited in the living room, where Morrie and Ted Koppel had done their first interview. I read the newspa­per that was lying on the table. Two Minnesota children had shot each other playing with their fathers’ guns. A baby had been found buried in a garbage can in an alley in Los Angeles.

I put down the paper and stared into the empty fire­place. I tapped my shoe lightly on the hardwood floor. Eventually, I heard a door open and close, then Char­lotte’s footsteps coming toward me.

“All right,” she said softly. “He’s ready for you.”

I rose and I turned toward our familiar spot, then saw a strange woman sitting at the end of the hall in a folding chair, her eyes on a book, her legs crossed. This was a hospice nurse, part of the twenty-four-hour watch.

Morrie’s study was empty. I was confused. Then I turned back hesitantly to the bedroom, and there he was, lying in bed, under the sheet. I had seen him like this only one other time—when he was getting massaged—and the echo of his aphorism “When you’re in bed, you’re dead” began anew inside my head.

I entered, pushing a smile onto my face. He wore a yellow pajama—like top, and a blanket covered him from the chest down. The lump of his form was so withered that I almost thought there was something missing. He was as small as a child.

Morrie’s mouth was open, and his skin was pale and tight against his cheekbones. When his eyes rolled toward me, he tried to speak, but I heard only a soft grunt.

There he is, I said, mustering all the excitement I could find in my empty till.

He exhaled, shut his eyes, then smiled, the very effort seeming to tire him.

“My … dear friend …” he finally said.

I am your friend, I said.

“I’m not … so good today …” Tomorrow will be better.

He pushed out another breath and forced a nod. He was struggling with something beneath the sheets, and I realized he was trying to move his hands toward the open­ing.

“Hold …” he said.

I pulled the covers down and grasped his fingers. They disappeared inside my own. I leaned in close, a few inches from his face. It was the first time I had seen him unshaven, the small white whiskers looking so out of place, as if someone had shaken salt neatly across his cheeks and chin. How could there be new life in his beard when it was draining everywhere else?

Morrie, I said softly. “Coach,” he corrected.

Coach, I said. I felt a shiver. He spoke in short bursts, inhaling air, exhaling words. His voice was thin and raspy. He smelled of ointment.

“You … are a good soul.” A good soul.

“Touched me …” he whispered. He moved my hands to his heart. “Here.”

It felt as if I had a pit in my throat. Coach?

“Ahh?”

I don’t know how to say good-bye.

He patted my hand weakly, keeping it on his chest.

“This … is how we say … good-bye …”

He breathed softly, in and out, I could feel his rib­cage rise and fall. Then he looked right at me.

“Love … you,” he rasped.

I love you, too, Coach.

“Know you do … know … something else…”

What else do you know?

“You … always have …

His eyes got small, and then he cried, his face con­torting like a baby who hasn’t figured how his tear ducts work. I held him close for several minutes. I rubbed his loose skin. I stroked his hair. I put a palm against his face and felt the bones close to the flesh and the tiny wet tears, as if squeezed from a dropper.

When his breathing approached normal again, I cleared my throat and said I knew he was tired, so I would be back next Tuesday, and I expected him to be a little more alert, thank you. He snorted lightly, as close as he could come to a laugh. It was a sad sound just the same.

I picked up the unopened bag with the tape recorder. Why had I even brought this? I knew we would never use it. I leaned in and kissed him closely, my face against his, whiskers on whiskers, skin on skin, holding it there, longer than normal, in case it gave him even a split second of pleasure.

Okay, then? I said, pulling away.

I blinked back the tears, and he smacked his lips to­gether and raised his eyebrows at the sight of my face. I like to think it was a fleeting moment of satisfaction for my dear old professor: he had finally made me cry.

“Okay, then,” he whispered.

Graduation

Morrie died on a Saturday morning.

His immediate family was with him in the house. Rob made it in from Tokyo—he got to kiss his father good- bye-and Jon was there, and of course Charlotte was there and Charlotte’s cousin Marsha, who had writ­ten the poem that so moved Morrie at his “unofficial” memorial service, the poem that likened him to a “tender sequoia.” They slept in shifts around his bed. Morrie had fallen into a coma two days after our final visit, and the doctor said he could go at any moment. Instead, he hung on, through a tough afternoon, through a dark night.

Finally, on the fourth of November, when those he loved had left the room just for a moment—to grab coffee in the kitchen, the first time none of them were with him since the coma began—Morrie stopped breath­ing.

And he was gone.

I believe he died this way on purpose. I believe he wanted no chilling moments, no one to witness his last breath and be haunted by it, the way he had been haunted by his mother’s death—notice telegram or by his father’s corpse in the city morgue.

I believe he knew that he was in his own bed, that his books and his notes and his small hibiscus plant were nearby. He wanted to go serenely, and that is how he went.

The funeral was held on a damp, windy morning. The grass was wet and the sky was the color of milk. We stood by the hole in the earth, close enough to hear the pond water lapping against the edge and to see ducks shaking off their feathers.

Although hundreds of people had wanted to attend, Charlotte kept this gathering small, just a few close friends and relatives. Rabbi Axelrod read a few poems. Morrie’s brother, David—who still walked with a limp from his childhood polio lifted the shovel and tossed dirt in the grave, as per tradition.

At one point, when Morrie’s ashes were placed into the ground, I glanced around the cemetery. Morrie was right. It was indeed a lovely spot, trees and grass and a sloping hill.

“You talk, I’ll listen, “he had said.

I tried doing that in my head and, to my happiness, found that the imagined conversation felt almost natural. I looked down at my hands, saw my watch and realized why.

It was Tuesday.

“My father moved through theys of we,
singing each new leaf out of each tree
(and every child was sure that spring
danced when she heard my father sing) …”

Poem by E. E. Cummings, read by Morrie’s son, Rob, at the Memorial service

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, Massachu­ setts, sooner rather than later, before that old man gets sick and loses his ability to dance.