by Mitch Albom
“That’s the thing, you see. Once you get your fingers on the important questions, you can’t turn away from them.”
And which are the important questions?
“As I see it, they have to do with love, responsibility, spirituality, awareness. And if I were healthy today, those would still be my issues. They should have been all along.”
I tried to imagine Morrie healthy. I tried to imagine him pulling the covers from his body, stepping from that chair, the two of us going for a walk around the neighborhood, the way we used to walk around campus. I suddenly realized it had been sixteen years since I’d seen him standing up. Sixteen years?
What if you had one day perfectly healthy, I asked? What would you do?
“Twenty-four hours?” Twenty-four hours.
“Let’s see … I’d get up in the morning, do my exercises, have a lovely breakfast of sweet rolls and tea, go for a swim, then have my friends come over for a nice lunch. I’d have them come one or two at a time so we could talk about their families, their issues, talk about how much we mean to each other.
“Then I’d like to go for a walk, in a garden with some trees, watch their colors, watch the birds, take in the nature that I haven’t seen in so long now.
“In the evening, we’d all go together to a restaurant with some great pasta, maybe some duck—I love duckand then we’d dance the rest of the night. I’d dance with all the wonderful dance partners out there, until I was exhausted. And then I’d go home and have a deep, wonderful sleep.”
That’s it?
“That’s it.”
It was so simple. So average. I was actually a little disappointed. I figured he’d fly to Italy or have lunch with the President or romp on the seashore or try every exotic thing he could think of. After all these months, lying there, unable to move a leg or a foot—how could he find perfection in such an average day?
Then I realized this was the whole point.
Before I left that day, Morrie asked if he could bring up a topic.
“Your brother,” he said.
I felt a shiver. I do not know how Morrie knew this was on my mind. I had been trying to call my brother in Spain for weeks, and had learned—from a friend of histhat he was flying back and forth to a hospital in Amsterdam.
“Mitch, I know it hurts when you can’t be with someone you love. But you need to be at peace with his desires. Maybe he doesn’t want you interrupting your life. Maybe he can’t deal with that burden. I tell everyone I know to carry on with the life they know—don’t ruin it because I am dying.”
But he’s my brother, I said.
“I know,” Morrie said. “That’s why it hurts.”
I saw Peter in my mind when he was eight years old, his curly blond hair puffed into a sweaty ball atop his head. I saw us wrestling in the yard next to our house, the grass stains soaking through the knees of our jeans. I saw him singing songs in front of the mirror, holding a brush as a microphone, and I saw us squeezing into the attic where we hid together as children, testing our parents’ will to find us for dinner.
And then I saw him as the adult who had drifted away, thin and frail, his face bony from the chemotherapy treatments.
Morrie, I said. Why doesn’t he want to see me?
My old professor sighed. “There is no formula to relationships. They have to be negotiated in loving ways, with room for both parties, what they want and what they need, what they can do and what their life is like.
“In business, people negotiate to win. They negotiate to get what they want. Maybe you’re too used to that. Love is different. Love is when you are as concerned about someone else’s situation as you are about your own.
“You’ve had these special times with your brother, and you no longer have what you had with him. You want them back. You never want them to stop. But that’s part of being human. Stop, renew, stop, renew.”
I looked at him. I saw all the death in the world. I felt helpless.
“You’ll find a way back to your brother,” Morrie said.
How do you know?
Morrie smiled. “You found me, didn’t you?”
“I heard a nice little story the other day,” Morrie says. He closes his eyes for a moment and I wait.
“Okay. The story is about a little wave, bobbing along in the ocean, having a grand old time. He’s enjoying the wind and the fresh air—until he notices the other waves in front of him, crashing against the shore.
“‘My God, this is terrible,’ the wave says. ‘Look what’s going to happen to me!’
“Then along comes another wave. It sees the first wave, looking grim, and it says to him, ‘Why do you look so sad?’
“The first wave says, ‘You don’t understand! We’re all going to crash! All of us waves are going to be nothing! Isn’t it terrible?’
“The second wave says, ‘No, you don’t understand. You’re not a wave, you’re part of the ocean.’”
I smile. Morrie closes his eyes again.
“Part of the ocean,” he says, “part of the ocean. “I watch him breathe, in and out, in and out.”
The Fourteenth Tuesday We Say Good-bye
It was cold and damp as I walked up the steps to Morrie’s house. I took in little details, things I hadn’t noticed for all the times I’d visited. The cut of the hill. The stone facade of the house. The pachysandra plants, the low shrubs. I walked slowly, taking my time, stepping on dead wet leaves that flattened beneath my feet.
Charlotte had called the day before to tell me Morrie was not doing well.” This was her way of saying the final days had arrived. Morrie had canceled all of his appointments and had been sleeping much of the time, which was unlike him. He never cared for sleeping, not when there were people he could talk with.
“He wants you to come visit,” Charlotte said, “but, Mitch …”
Yes?
“He’s very weak.”
The porch steps. The glass in the front door. I absorbed these things in a slow, observant manner, as if seeing them for the first time. I felt the tape recorder in the bag on my shoulder, and I unzipped it to make sure I had tapes. I don’t know why. I always had tapes.
Connie answered the bell. Normally buoyant, she had a drawn look on her face. Her hello was softly spoken.
“How’s he doing?” I said.
“Not so good.” She bit her lower lip. “I don’t like to think about it. He’s such a sweet man, you know?”
I knew.
“This is such a shame.”
Charlotte came down the hall and hugged me. She said that Morrie was still sleeping, even though it was 10 A.M. We went into the kitchen. I helped her straighten up, noticing all the bottles of pills, lined up on the table, a small army of brown plastic soldiers with white caps. My old professor was taking morphine now to ease his 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, Massachusetts, sooner rather than later, before that old man gets sick and loses his ability to dance.
I know I cannot do this. None of us can undo what we’ve done, or relive a life already recorded. But if Professor Morris Schwartz taught me anything at all, it was this: there is no such thing as “too late” in life. He was changing until the day he said good-bye.
Not long after Morrie’s death, I reached my brother in Spain. We had a long talk. I told him I respected his distance, and that all I wanted was to be in touch—in the present, not just the past—to hold him in my life as much as he could let me.
“You’re my only brother,” I said. “I don’t want to lose you. I love you.”
I had never said such a thing to him before.
A few days later, I received a message on my fax machine. It was typed in the sprawling, poorly punctuated, all-cap-letters fashion that always characterized my brother’s words.
“HI I’VE JOINED THE NINETIES!” it began. He wrote a few little stories, what he’d been doing that week, a couple of jokes. At the end, he signed off this way:
I have heartburn and diahrea at the moment—life’s a bitch. Chat later?
Sore Tush.
I laughed until there were tears in my eyes.
This book was largely Morrie’s idea. He called it our “final thesis.” Like the best of work projects, it brought us closer together, and Morrie was delighted when several publishers expressed interest, e
ven though he died before meeting any of them. The advance money helped pay Morrie’s enormous medical bills, and for that we were both grateful.
The title, by the way, we came up with one day in Morrie’s office. He liked naming things. He had several
ideas. But when I said, “How about Tuesdays with Morrie ?” he smiled in an almost blushing way, and I knew that was it.
After Morrie died, I went through boxes of old college material. And I discovered a final paper I had written for one of his classes. It was twenty years old now. On the front page were my penciled comments scribbled to Morrie, and beneath them were his comments scribbled back.
Mine began, “Dear Coach …’
His began, “Dear Player …”
For some reason, each time I read that, I miss him more.
Have you ever really had a teacher? One who saw you as a raw but precious thing, a jewel that, with wisdom, could be polished to a proud shine? If you are lucky enough to find your way to such teachers, you will always find your way back. Sometimes it is only in your head. Sometimes it is right alongside their beds.
The last class of my old professor’s life took place once a week, in his home, by a window in his study where he could watch a small hibiscus plant shed its pink flowers. The class met on Tuesdays. No books were required. The subject was the meaning of life. It was taught from experience.
The teaching goes on.
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