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

Why?

“Because it’s the ultimate sign of dependency. Some­one wiping your bottom. But I’m working on it. I’m trying to enjoy the process.”

Enjoy it?

“Yes. After all, I get to be a baby one more time.” That’s a unique way of looking at it.

“Well, I have to look at life uniquely now. Let’s face it. I can’t go shopping, I can’t take care of the bank accounts, I can’t take out the garbage. But I can sit here with my dwindling days and look at what I think is im­ portant in life. I have both the time—and the reason—to do that.”

So, I said, in a reflexively cynical response, I guess the key to finding the meaning of life is to stop taking out the garbage?

He laughed, and I was relieved that he did.

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

You bother keeping up with the news, I asked? “Yes,” Morrie said. “Do you think that’s strange? Do you think because I’m dying, I shouldn’t care what hap­pens in this world?”

Maybe.

He sighed. “Maybe you’re right. Maybe I shouldn’t care. After all, I won’t be around to see how it all turns out.

“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.”

His eyes got moist, and I tried to change the subject, but he dabbed his face and waved me off.

“I cry all the time now,” he said. “Never mind.”

Amazing , I thought. I worked in the news business. I covered stories where people died. I interviewed grieving family members. I even attended the funerals. I never cried. Morrie, for the suffering of people half a world away, was weeping. Is this what comes at the end, I won­dered? Maybe death is the great equalizer, the one big thing that can finally make strangers shed a tear for one another.

Morrie honked loudly into the tissue. “This is okay with you, isn’t it? Men crying?”

Sure, I said, too quickly.

He grinned. “Ah, Mitch, I’m gonna loosen you up. One day, I’m gonna show you it’s okay to cry.”

Yeah, yeah, I said. “Yeah, yeah,” he said.

We laughed because he used to say the same thing nearly twenty years earlier. Mostly on Tuesdays. In fact, Tuesday had always been our day together. Most of my courses with Morrie were on Tuesdays, he had office hours on Tuesdays, and when I wrote my senior thesis­which was pretty much Morrie’s suggestion, right from the start— it was on Tuesdays that we sat together, by his desk, or in the cafeteria, or on the steps of Pearlman Hall, going over the work.

So it seemed only fitting that we were back together on a Tuesday, here in the house with the Japanese maple out front. As I readied to go, I mentioned this to Mor­rie.

“We’re Tuesday people,” he said. Tuesday people, I repeated.

Morrie smiled.

“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 to 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 man named Levine said it right. He said, ‘Love is the only rational act.’”

He repeated it carefully, pausing for effect. “‘Love is the only rational act.’”

I nodded, like a good student, and he exhaled weakly. I leaned over to give him a hug. And then, although it is not really like me, I kissed him on the cheek. I felt his weakened hands on my arms, the thin stubble of his whiskers brushing my face.

“So you’ll come back next Tuesday?” he whispered.

He enters the classroom, sits down, doesn’t say anything. He looks at its, we look at him. At first, there are a few giggles, but Morrie only shrugs, and eventually a deep silence falls and we begin to notice the smallest sounds, the radiator humming in the corner of the room, the nasal breathing of one of the fat stu­ dents.

Some of us are agitated. When is lie going to say something? We squirm, check our watches. A few students look out the window, trying to be above it all. This goes on a good fifteen minutes, before Morrie finally breaks in with a whisper.

“What’s happening here?” he asks.

And slowly a discussion begins as Morrie has wanted all along—about the effect of silence on human relations. My are we embarrassed by silence? What comfort do we find in all the noise?

I am not bothered by the silence. For all the noise I make with my friends, I am still not comfortable talking about my feelings in front of others—especially not classmates. I could sit in the quiet for hours if that is what the class demanded.

On my way out, Morrie stops me. “You didn’t say much today,” he remarks.

I don’t know. I just didn’t have anything to add.

“I think you have a lot to add. In fact, Mitch, you remind me of someone I knew who also liked to keep things to himself when he was younger.”

Who?

“Me.”

The Second Tuesday We Talk About Feeling Sorry for Yourself

I came back the next Tuesday. And for many Tuesdays that followed. I looked forward to these visits more than one would think, considering I was flying seven hundred miles to sit alongside a dying man. But I seemed to slip into a time warp when I visited Morrie, and I liked myself better when I was there. I no longer rented a cellular phone for the rides from the airport. Let them wait , I told myself, mimicking Morrie.

The newspaper situation in Detroit had not improved. In fact, it had grown increasingly insane, with nasty con­ frontations between picketers and replacement workers, people arrested, beaten, lying in the street in front of de­ livery trucks.

In light of this, my visits with Morrie felt like a cleansing rinse of human kindness. We talked about life and we talked about love. We talked about one of Mor­rie’s favorite subjects, compassion, and why our society had such a shortage of it. Before my third visit, I stopped at a market called Bread and Circus—I had seen their bags in Morrie’s house and figured he must like the food there—and I loaded up with plastic containers from their fresh food take- away, things like vermicelli with vegeta­bles and carrot soup and baklava.

When I entered Morrie’s study, I lifted the bags as if I’d just robbed a bank.

“Food man!” I bellowed.

Morrie rolled his eyes and smiled.

Meanwhile, I looked for signs of the disease’s progres­sion. His fingers worked well enough to write with a pencil, or hold up his glasses, but he could not lift his arms much higher than his chest. He was spending less and less time in the kitchen or living room and more in his study, where he had a large reclining chair set up with pillows, blankets, and specially cut pieces of foam rubber that held his feet and gave support to his withered legs. He kept a bell near his side, and when his head needed adjusting or he had to “go on the commode,” as he re­ ferred to it, he would shake the bell and Connie, Tony, Bertha, or Amy—his small army of home care workers­would come in. It wasn’t always easy for him to lift the bell, and he got frustrated when he couldn’t make it work.

I asked Morrie if he felt sorry for himself.

“Sometimes, in the mornings,” he said. “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.