“Part Three of Five.” Tuesday with Morris: an Old Man, a Young Man, and Life's Greatest Lesson, by Mitch Albom, Broadway Books, 1997.
When Morrie was a teenager, his father took him to a fur factory where he worked. This was during the Depression. The idea was to get Morrie a job.
He entered the factory, and immediately felt as if the walls had closed in around him. The room was dark and hot, the windows covered with filth, and the machines were packed tightly together, churning like train wheels. The fur hairs were flying, creating a thickened air, and the workers, sewing the pelts together, were bent over their needles as the boss marched up and down the rows, screaming for them to go faster. Morrie could barely breathe. He stood next to his father, frozen with fear, hoping the boss wouldn’t scream at him, too.
During lunch break, his father took Morrie to the boss and pushed him in front of him, asking if there was any work for his son. But there was barely enough work for the adult laborers, and no one was giving it up.
This, for Morrie, was a blessing. He hated the place. He made another vow that he kept to the end of his life: he would never do any work that exploited someone else, and he would never allow himself to make money off the sweat of others.
“What will you do?” Eva would ask him.
“I don’t know,” he would say. He ruled out law, because he didn’t like lawyers, and he ruled out medicine, because he couldn’t take the sight of blood.
“What will you do?”
It was only through default that the best professor I ever had became a teacher.
“A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell where his influence stops.”
Henry Adams
The Fourth Tuesday We Talk About Death
“Let’s begin with this idea,” Morrie said. “Everyone knows they’re going to die, but nobody believes it.” He was in a businesslike mood this Tuesday. The subject was death, the first item on my list. Before I arrived, Morrie had scribbled a few notes on small white pieces of paper so that he wouldn’t forget. His shaky handwriting was now indecipherable to everyone but him. It was almost Labor Day, and through the office window I could see the spinach-colored hedges of the backyard and hear the yells of children playing down the street, their last week of freedom before school began.
Back in Detroit, the newspaper strikers were gearing up for a huge holiday demonstration, to show the solidarity of unions against management. On the plane ride
in, I had read about a woman who had shot her husband and two daughters as they lay sleeping, claiming she was protecting them from “the bad people.” In California, the lawyers in the O. J. Simpson trial were becoming huge celebrities.
Here in Morrie’s office, life went on one precious day at a time. Now we sat together, a few feet from the newest addition to the house: an oxygen machine. It was small and portable, about knee-high. On some nights, when he couldn’t get enough air to swallow, Morrie attached the long plastic tubing to his nose, clamping on his nostrils like a leech. I hated the idea of Morrie connected to a machine of any kind, and I tried not to look at it as Morrie spoke.
“Everyone knows they’re going to die,” he said again, “but nobody believes it. If we did, we would do things differently.”
So we kid ourselves about death, I said.
“Yes. But there’s a better approach. To know you’re going to die, and to be prepared for it at any time. That’s better. That way you can actually be more involved in your life while you’re living.”
How can you ever be prepared to die?
“Do what the Buddhists do. Every day, have a little bird on your shoulder that asks, ‘Is today the day? Am I ready? Am I doing all I need to do? Am I being the person I want to be?’”
He turned his head to his shoulder as if the bird were there now.
“Is today the day I die?” he said.
Morrie borrowed freely from all religions. He was born Jewish, but became an agnostic when he was a teenager, partly because of all that had happened to him as a child. He enjoyed some of the philosophies of Buddhism and Christianity, and he still felt at home, culturally, in Judaism. He was a religious mutt, which made him even more open to the students he taught over the years. And the things he was saying in his final months on earth seemed to transcend all religious differences. Death has a way of doing that.
“The truth is, Mitch,” he said, “once you learn how to die, you learn how to live.”
I nodded.
“I’m going to say it again,” he said. “Once you learn how to die, you learn how to live.”
He smiled, and I realized what he was doing. He was making sure I absorbed this point, without embarrassing me by asking. It was part of what made him a good teacher.
Did you think much about death before you got sick, I asked.
“No.” Morrie smiled. “I was like everyone else. I once told a friend of mine, in a moment of exuberance, ‘I’m gonna be the healthiest old man you ever met!’” How old were you?
“In my sixties.”
So you were optimistic.
“Why not? Like I said, no one really believes they’re going to die.”
But everyone knows someone who has died, I said. Why is it so hard to think about dying?
“Because,” Morrie continued, “most of us all walk around as if we’re sleepwalking. We really don’t experience the world fully, because we’re half-asleep, doing things we automatically think we have to do.”
And facing death changes all that?
“Oh, yes. You strip away all that stuff and you focus on the essentials. When you realize you are going to die, you see everything much differently.
He sighed. “Learn how to die, and you learn how to live.”
I noticed that he quivered now when he moved his hands. His glasses hung around his neck, and when he lifted them to his eyes, they slid around his temples, as if he were trying to put them on someone else in the dark. I reached over to help guide them onto his ears.
“Thank you,” Morrie whispered. He smiled when my hand brushed up against his head. The slightest human contact was immediate joy.
“Mitch. Can I tell you something?” Of course, I said.
“You might not like it.” Why not?
“Well, the truth is, if you really listen to that bird on your shoulder, if you accept that you can die at any timethen you might not be as ambitious as you are.”
I forced a small grin.
“The things you spend so much time on—all this work you do—might not seem as important. You might have to make room for some more spiritual things.”
Spiritual things?
“You hate that word, don’t you? ‘Spiritual.’ You think it’s touchy-feely stuff.” Well, I said.
He tried to wink, a bad try, and I broke down and laughed.
“Mitch,” he said, laughing along, “even I don’t know what ‘spiritual development’ really means. But I do know we’re deficient in some way. We are too involved in materialistic things, and they don’t satisfy us. The loving relationships we have, the universe around us, we take these things for granted.”
He nodded toward the window with the sunshine streaming in. “You see that? You can go out there, outside, anytime. You can run up and down the block and go crazy. I can’t do that. I can’t go out. I can’t run. I can’t be out there without fear of getting sick. But you know what? I appreciate that window more than you do.” Appreciate it?
“Yes. I look out that window every day. I notice the change in the trees, how strong the wind is blowing. It’s as if I can see time actually passing through that windowpane.
Because I know my time is almost done, I am drawn to nature like I’m seeing it for the first time.”
He stopped, and for a moment we both just looked out the window. I tried to see what he saw. I tried to see time and seasons, my life passing in slow motion. Morrie dropped his head slightly and curled it toward his shoulder.
“Is it today, little bird?” he asked. “Is it today?”
Letters from around the world kept coming to Morrie, thanks to the “Nightline” appearances. He would sit, when he was up to it, and dictate the responses to friends and family who gathered for their letter-writing sessions.
One Sunday when his sons, Rob and Jon, were home, they all gathered in the living room. Morrie sat in his wheelchair, his skinny legs under a blanket. When he got cold, one of his helpers draped a nylon jacket over his shoulders.
“What’s the first letter?” Morrie said.
A colleague read a note from a woman named Nancy, who had lost her mother to ALS. She wrote to say how much she had suffered through the loss and how she knew that Morrie must be suffering, too.
“All right,” Morrie said when the reading was complete. He shut his eyes. “Let’s start by saying, ‘Dear Nancy, you touched me very much with your story about your mother. And I understand what you went through. There is sadness and suffering on both parts. DRAWDEGrieving has been good for me, and I hope it has been good for you also.’”
“You might want to change that last line,” Rob said.
Morrie thought for a second, then said, “You’re right. How about ‘I hope you can find the healing power in grieving.’ Is that better?”
Rob nodded.
“Add ‘thank you, Morrie,’”Morrie said.
Another letter was read from a woman named Jane, who was thanking him for his inspiration on the “Nightline” program. She referred to him as a prophet.
“That’s a very high compliment,” said a colleague. “A prophet.”
Morrie made a face. He obviously didn’t agree with the assessment. “Let’s thank her for her high praise. And tell her I’m glad my words meant something to her.
“And don’t forget to sign ‘Thank you, Morrie.’”
There was a letter from a man in England who had lost his mother and asked Morrie to help him contact her through the spiritual world. There was a letter from a couple who wanted to drive to Boston to meet him. There was a long letter from a former graduate student who wrote about her life after the university. It told of a murder—suicide and three stillborn births. It told of a mother who died from ALS. It expressed fear that she, the daughter, would also contract the disease. It went on and on. Two pages. Three pages. Four pages.
Morrie sat through the long, grim tale. When it was finally finished, he said softly,
“Well, what do we answer?”
The group was quiet. Finally, Rob said, “How about, ‘Thanks for your long letter?’”
Everyone laughed. Morrie looked at his son and beamed.
The newspaper near his chair has a photo of a Boston baseball player who is smiling after pitching a shutout. Of all the diseases, I think to myself, Morrie gets one named after an athlete.
You remember Lou Gehrig, I ask?
“I remember him in the stadium, saying good-bye.” So you remember the famous line.
“Which one?”
Come on. Lou Gehrig. “Pride of the Yankees”? The speech that echoes over the loudspeakers?
“Remind me,” Morrie says. “Do the speech.”
Through the open window I hear the sound of a garbage truck. Although it is hot, Morrie is wearing long sleeves, with a blanket over his legs, his skin pale. The disease owns him.
I raise my voice and do the Gehrig imitation, where the words bounce off the stadium walls: “Too-dayyy … I feeel like … the luckiest maaaan … on the face of the earth …”
Morrie closes his eyes and nods slowly.
“Yeah. Well. I didn’t say that.”
The Fifth Tuesday We Talk About Family
It was the first week in September, back-toschool week, and after thirty-five consecutive autumns, my old professor did not have a class waiting for him on a college campus. Boston was teeming with students, double-parked on side streets, unloading trunks. And here was Morrie in his study. It seemed wrong, like those football players who finally retire and have to face that first Sunday at home, watching on TV, thinking, I could still do that. I have learned from dealing with those players that it is best to leave them alone when their old seasons come around. Don’t say anything. But then, I didn’t need to remind Morrie of his dwindling time.
For our taped conversations, we had switched from handheld microphones—because it was too difficult now for Morrie to hold anything that long—to the lavaliere kind popular with TV newspeople. You can clip these onto a collar or lapel. Of course, since Morrie only wore soft cotton shirts that hung loosely on his ever-shrinking frame, the microphone sagged and flopped, and I had to reach over and adjust it frequently. Morrie seemed to enjoy this because it brought me close to him, in hugging range, and his need for physical affection was stronger than ever. When I leaned in, I heard his wheezing breath and his weak coughing, and he smacked his lips softly before he swallowed.
“Well, my friend,” he said, “what are we talking about today?” How about family?
“Family.” He mulled it over for a moment. “Well, you see mine, all around me.”
He nodded to photos on his bookshelves, of Morrie as a child with his grandmother; Morrie as a young man with his brother, David; Morrie with his wife, Charlotte; Morrie with his two sons, Rob, a journalist in Tokyo, and ion, a computer expert in Boston.
“I think, in light of what we’ve been talking about all these weeks, family becomes even more important,” he said.
“The fact is, there is no foundation, no secure ground, upon which people may stand today if it isn’t the family. It’s become quite clear to me as I’ve been sick. If you don’t have the support and love and caring and concern that you get from a family, you don’t have much at all. Love is so supremely important. As our great poet Auden said, ‘Love each other or perish.’”
“Love each other or perish.” I wrote it down. Auden said that?
“Love each other or perish,” Morrie said. “It’s good, no? And it’s so true. Without love, we are birds with broken wings.
“Say I was divorced, or living alone, or had no children. This disease—what I’m going through—would be so much harder. I’m not sure I could do it. Sure, people would come visit, friends, associates, but it’s not the same as having someone who will not leave. It’s not the same as having someone whom you know has an eye on you, is watching you the whole time.
“This is part of what a family is about, not just love, but letting others know there’s someone who is watching out for them. It’s what I missed so much when my mother died—what I call your ‘spiritual security’—knowing that your family will be there watching out for you. Nothing else will give you that. Not money. Not fame.”
He shot me a look.
“Not work,” he added.
Raising a family was one of those issues on my little list—things you want to get right before it’s too late. I told Morrie about my generation’s dilemma with having children, how we often saw them as tying us down, making us into these “parent” things that we did not want to be. I admitted to some of these emotions myself.
Yet when I looked at Morrie, I wondered if I were in his shoes, about to die, and I had no family, no children, would the emptiness be unbearable? He had raised his two sons to be loving and caring, and like Morrie, they were not shy with their affection. Had he so desired, they would have stopped what they were doing to be with their father every minute of his final months. But that was not what he wanted.
“Do not stop your lives,” he told them. “Otherwise, this disease will have ruined three of us instead of one.” In this way, even as he was dying, he showed respect for his children’s worlds. Little wonder that when they sat with him, there was a waterfall of affection, lots of kisses and jokes and crouching by the side of the bed, holding hands.
“Whenever people ask me about having children or not having children, I never tell them what to do,” Morrie said now, looking at a photo of his oldest son. “I simply say, ‘There is no experience like having children.’ That’s all. There is no substitute for it. You cannot do it with a friend. You cannot do it with a lover. If you want the experience of having complete responsibility for another human being, and to learn how to love and bond in the deepest way, then you should have children.”
So you would do it again? I asked.
I glanced at the photo. Rob was kissing Morrie on the forehead, and Morrie was laughing with his eyes closed.
“Would I do it again?” he said to me, looking surprised. “Mitch, I would not have missed that experience for anything. Even though … “
He swallowed and put the picture in his lap.
“Even though there is a painful price to pay,” he said. Because you’ll be leaving them. “Because I’ll be leaving them soon.”
He pulled his lips together, closed his eyes, and I watched the first teardrop fall down the side of his cheek.
“And now,” he whispered, “you talk.”
Me?
“Your family. I know about your parents. I met them, years ago, at graduation. You have a sister, too, right?” Yes, I said.
“Older, yes?” Older.
“And one brother, right?” I nodded. “Younger?”
Younger.
“Like me,” Morrie said. “I have a younger brother.” Like you, I said.
“He also came to your graduation, didn’t he?”
I blinked, and in my mind I saw us all there, sixteen years earlier, the hot sun, the blue robes, squinting as we put our arms around each other and posed for Instamatic photos, someone saying, “One, two, threeee … “
“What is it?” Morrie said, noticing my sudden quiet. “What’s on your mind?”
Nothing, I said, changing the subject.
The truth is, I do indeed have a brother, a blondhaired, hazel-eyed, two-years-younger brother, who looks so unlike me or my dark-haired sister that we used to tease him by claiming strangers had left him as a baby on our doorstep. “And one day,” we’d say, “they’re coming back to get you.” He cried when we said this, but we said it just the same.
He grew up the way many youngest children grow up, pampered, adored, and inwardly tortured. He dreamed of being an actor or a singer; he reenacted TV shows at the dinner table, playing every part, his bright smile practically jumping through his lips. I was the good student, he was the bad; I was obedient, he broke the rules; I stayed away from drugs and alcohol, he tried everything you could ingest. He moved to Europe not long after high school, preferring the more casual lifestyle he found there. Yet he remained the family favorite. When he visited home, in his wild and funny presence, I often felt stiff and conservative.
As different as we were, I reasoned that our fates would shoot in opposite directions once we hit adulthood. I was right in all ways but one. From the day my uncle died, I believed that I would suffer a similar death, an untimely disease that would take me out. So I worked at a feverish pace, and I braced myself for cancer. I could feel its breath. I knew it was coming. I waited for it the way a condemned man waits for the executioner.
And I was right. It came.
But it missed me.
It struck my brother.
The same type of cancer as my uncle. The pancreas. A rare form. And so the youngest of our family, with the blond hair and the hazel eyes, had the chemotherapy and the radiation. His hair fell out, his face went gaunt as a skeleton. It’s supposed to be me, I thought. But my brother was not me, and he was not my uncle. He was a fighter, and had been since his youngest days, when we wrestled in the basement and he actually bit through my shoe until I screamed in pain and let him go.
And so he fought back. He battled the disease in Spain, where he lived, with the aid of an experimental drug that was not—and still is not—available in the United States. He flew all over Europe for treatments. After five years of treatment, the drug appeared to chase the cancer into remission.
That was the good news. The bad news was, my brother did not want me around—not me, nor anyone in the family. Much as we tried to call and visit, he held us at bay, insisting this fight was something he needed to do by himself. Months would pass without a word from him. Messages on his answering machine would go without reply. I was ripped with guilt for what I felt I should be doing for him and fueled with anger for his denying us the right to do it.
So once again, I dove into work. I worked because I could control it. I worked because work was sensible and responsive. And each time I would call my brother’s apartment in
Spain and get the answering machine—him speaking in Spanish, another sign of how far apart we had drifted—I would hang up and work some more.
Perhaps this is one reason I was drawn to Morrie. He let me be where my brother would not.
Looking back, perhaps Morrie knew this all along.
It is a winter in my childhood, on a snow packed hill in our suburban neighborhood. My brother and I are on the sled, him on top, me on the bottom. I feel his chin on my shoulder and his feet on the backs of my knees.
The sled rumbles on icy patches beneath us. We pick up speed as we descend the hill.
“CAR!” someone yells.
We see it coming, down the street to our left. We scream and try to steer away, but the runners do not move. The driver slams his horn and hits his brakes, and we do what all kids do: we jump off. In our hooded parkas, we roll like logs down the cold, wet snow, thinking the next thing to touch us will be the hard rubber of a car tire. We are yelling
“AHHHHHH” and we are tingling with fear, turning over and over, the world upside down, right side up, upside down.
And then, nothing. We stop rolling and catch our breath and wipe the dripping snow from our faces. The driver turns down the street, wagging his finger. We are safe. Our sled has thudded quietly into a snowbank, and ourfriends are slapping us now, saying “Cool” and “You could have died.”
I grin at my brother, and we are united by childish pride. That wasn’t so hard, we think, and we are ready to take on death again.
The Sixth Tuesday We Talk About Emotions
I walked past the mountain laurels and the Japanese maple, up the bluestone steps of
Morrie’s house. The white rain gutter hung like a lid over the doorway. I rang the bell and was greeted not by Connie but by Morrie’s wife, Charlotte, a beautiful gray-haired woman who spoke in a lilting voice. She was not often at home when I came by—she continued working at MIT, as Morrie wished—and I was surprised this morning to see her.
“Morrie’s having a bit of a hard time today,” she said. She stared over my shoulder for a moment, then moved toward the kitchen.
I’m sorry, I said.
“No, no, he’ll be happy to see you,” she said quickly. “Sure …”
She stopped in the middle of the sentence, turning her head slightly, listening for something. Then she continued. “I’m sure … he’ll feel better when he knows you’re here.”
I lifted up the bags from the market—my normal food supply, I said jokingly—and she seemed to smile and fret at the same time.
“There’s already so much food. He hasn’t eaten any from last time.”
This took me by surprise. He hasn’t eaten any, I asked?
She opened the refrigerator and I saw familiar containers of chicken salad, vermicelli, vegetables, stuffed squash, all things I had brought for Morrie. She opened the freezer and there was even more.
“Morrie can’t eat most of this food. It’s too hard for him to swallow. He has to eat soft things and liquid drinks now.”
But he never said anything, I said.
Charlotte smiled. “He doesn’t want to hurt your feelings.”
It wouldn’t have hurt my feelings. I just wanted to help in some way. I mean, I just wanted to bring him something …
“You are bringing him something. He looks forward to your visits. He talks about having to do this project with you, how he has to concentrate and put the time aside. I think it’s giving him a good sense of purpose …”
Again, she gave that faraway look, the tuning-in-something-from-somewhere-else. I knew Morrie’s nights were becoming difficult, that he didn’t sleep through them, and that meant Charlotte often did not sleep through them either. Sometimes Morrie would lie awake coughing for hours—it would take that long to get the phlegm from his throat.
There were health care workers now staying through the night and all those visitors during the day, former students, fellow professors, meditation teachers, tramping in and out of the house. On some days, Morrie had a half a dozen visitors, and they were often there when Charlotte returned from work. She handled it with patience, even though all these outsiders were soaking up her precious minutes with Morrie.
“… a sense of purpose,” she continued. “Yes. That’s good, you know.”
“I hope so,” I said.
I helped put the new food inside the refrigerator. The kitchen counter had all kinds of notes, messages, information, medical instructions. The table held more pill bottles than ever—Selestone for his asthma, Ativan to help him sleep, naproxen for infections— along with a powdered milk mix and laxatives. From down the hall, we heard the sound of a door open.
“Maybe he’s available now … let me go check.”
Charlotte glanced again at my food and I felt suddenly ashamed. All these reminders of things Morrie would never enjoy.
The small horrors of his illness were growing, and when I finally sat down with Morrie, he was coughing more than usual, a dry, dusty cough that shook his chest and made his head jerk forward. After one violent surge, he stopped, closed his eyes, and took a breath. I sat quietly because I thought he was recovering from his exertion.
“Is the tape on?” he said suddenly, his eyes still closed.
Yes, yes, I quickly said, pressing down the play and record buttons.
“What I’m doing now,” he continued, his eyes still closed, “is detaching myself from the experience.”
Detaching yourself?
“Yes. Detaching myself. And this is important—not just for someone like me, who is dying, but for someone like you, who is perfectly healthy. Learn to detach.”
He opened his eyes. He exhaled. “You know what the Buddhists say? Don’t cling to things, because everything is impermanent.”
But wait, I said. Aren’t you always talking about experiencing life? All the good emotions, all the bad ones?
“Yes. “
Well, how can you do that if you’re detached?
“Ah. You’re thinking, Mitch. But detachment doesn’t mean you don’t let the experience penetrate you. On the contrary, you let it penetrate you fully. That’s how you are able to leave it.”
I’m lost.
“Take any emotion—love for a woman, or grief for a loved one, or what I’m going through, fear and pain from a deadly illness. If you hold back on the emotions—if you don’t allow yourself to go all the way through them—you can never get to being detached, you’re too busy being afraid. You’re afraid of the pain, you’re afraid of the grief. You’re afraid of the vulnerability that loving entails.
“But by throwing yourself into these emotions, by allowing yourself to dive in, all the way, over your head even, you experience them fully and completely. You know what pain is. You know what love is. You know what grief is. And only then can you say, ‘All right. I have experienced that emotion. I recognize that emotion. Now I need to detach from that emotion for a moment.’”
Morrie stopped and looked me over, perhaps to make sure I was getting this right.
“I know you think this is just about dying,” he said, “but it’s like I keep telling you. When you learn how to die, you learn how to live.”
Morrie talked about his most fearful moments, when he felt his chest locked in heaving surges or when he wasn’t sure where his next breath would come from. These were horrifying times, he said, and his first emotions were horror, fear, anxiety. But once he recognized the feel of those emotions, their texture, their moisture, the shiver down the back, the quick flash of heat that crosses your brain—then he was able to say, “Okay. This is fear. Step away from it. Step away.”
I thought about how often this was needed in everyday life. How we feel lonely, sometimes to the point of tears, but we don’t let those tears come because we are not supposed to cry. Or how we feel a surge of love for a partner but we don’t say anything because we’re frozen with the fear of what those words might do to the relationship.
Morrie’s approach was exactly the opposite. Turn on the faucet. Wash yourself with the emotion. It won’t hurt you. It will only help. If you let the fear inside, if you pull it on like a familiar shirt, then you can say to yourself, “All right, it’s just fear, I don’t have to let it control me. I see it for what it is.”
Same for loneliness: you let go, let the tears flow, feel it completely—but eventually be able to say, “All right, that was my moment with loneliness. I’m not afraid of feeling lonely, but now I’m going to put that loneliness aside and know that there are other emotions in the world, and I’m going to experience them as well.”
“Detach,” Morrie said again.
He closed his eyes, then coughed. Then he coughed again. Then he coughed again, more loudly.
Suddenly, he was half-choking, the congestion in his lungs seemingly teasing him, jumping halfway up, then dropping back down, stealing his breath. He was gagging, then hacking violently, and he shook his hands in front of him—with his eyes closed, shaking his hands, he appeared almost possessed—and I felt my forehead break into a sweat. I instinctively pulled him forward and slapped the back of his shoulders, and he pushed a tissue to his mouth and spit out a wad of phlegm.
The coughing stopped, and Morrie dropped back into the foam pillows and sucked in air.
“You okay? You all right?” I said, trying to hide my fear.
“I’m … okay,” Morrie whispered, raising a shaky finger. “Just … wait a minute.”
We sat there quietly until his breathing returned to normal. I felt the perspiration on my scalp. He asked me to close the window, the breeze was making him cold. I didn’t mention that it was eighty degrees outside.
Finally, in a whisper, he said, “I know how I want to die.”
I waited in silence.
“I want to die serenely. Peacefully. Not like what just happened.
“And this is where detachment comes in. If I die in the middle of a coughing spell like I just had, I need to be able to detach from the horror, I need to say, ‘This is my moment.’ “I don’t want to leave the world in a state of fright. I want to know what’s happening,
accept it, get to a peaceful place, and let go. Do you understand?” I nodded.
Don’t let go yet, I added quickly.
Morrie forced a smile. “No. Not yet. We still have work to do.”
Do you believe in reincarnation? I ask. “Perhaps.”
What would you come back as? ‘If I had my choice, a gazelle.” “A gazelle?”
“Yes. So graceful. So fast.” “A gazelle?”
Morrie smiles at me. “You think that’s strange?”
I study his shrunken frame, the loose clothes, the sockswrapped feet that rest stiffly on foam rubber cushions, unable to move, like a prisoner in leg irons. I picture a gazelle racing across the desert.
No, I say. I don’t think that’s strange at all.
The Professor, Part Two
The Morrie I knew, the Morrie so many others knew, would not have been the man he was without the years he spent working at a mental hospital just outside Washington, D.C., a place with the deceptively peaceful name of Chestnut Lodge. It was one of Morrie’s first jobs after plowing through a master’s degree and a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago. Having rejected medicine, law, and business, Morrie had decided the research world would be a place where he could contribute without exploiting others.
Morrie was given a grant to observe mental patients and record their treatments. While the idea seems common today, it was groundbreaking in the early fifties. Morrie saw patients who would scream all day. Patients who would cry all night. Patients soiling their underwear. Patients refusing to eat, having to be held down, medicated, fed intravenously.
One of the patients, a middle-aged woman, came out of her room every day and lay facedown on the tile floor, stayed there for hours, as doctors and nurses stepped around her. Morrie watched in horror. He took notes, which is what he was there to do. Every day, she did the same thing: came out in the morning, lay on the floor, stayed there until the evening, talking to no one, ignored by everyone. It saddened Morrie. He began to sit on the floor with her, even lay down alongside her, trying to draw her out of her misery. Eventually, he got her to sit up, and even to return to her room. What she mostly wanted, he learned, was the same thing many people want—someone to notice she was there.
Morrie worked at Chestnut Lodge for five years. Although it wasn’t encouraged, he befriended some of the patients, including a woman who joked with him about how lucky she was to be there “because my husband is rich so he can afford it. Can you imagine if
I had to be in one of those cheap mental hospitals?”
Another woman—who would spit at everyone else took to Morrie and called him her friend. They talked each day, and the staff was at least encouraged that someone had gotten through to her. But one day she ran away, and Morrie was asked to help bring her back. They tracked her down in a nearby store, hiding in the back, and when Morrie went in, she burned an angry look at him.
“So you’re one of them, too,” she snarled.
“One of who?”
“My jailers.”
Morrie observed that most of the patients there had been rejected and ignored in their lives, made to feel that they didn’t exist. They also missed compassion—something the staff ran out of quickly. And many of these patients were well-off, from rich families, so their wealth did not buy them happiness or contentment. It was a lesson he never forgot.
I used to tease Morrie that he was stuck in the sixties. He would answer that the sixties weren’t so bad, compared to the times we lived in now.
He came to Brandeis after his work in the mental health field, just before the sixties began. Within a few years, the campus became a hotbed for cultural revolution. Drugs, sex, race, Vietnam protests. Abbie Hoffman attended Brandeis. So did Jerry Rubin and Angela Davis. Morrie had many of the “radical” students in his classes.
That was partly because, instead of simply teaching, the sociology faculty got involved. It was fiercely antiwar, for example. When the professors learned that students who did not maintain a certain grade point average could lose their deferments and be drafted, they decided not to give any grades. When the administration said, “If you don’t give these students grades, they will all fail,” Morrie had a solution: “Let’s give them all A’s.” And they did.
Just as the sixties opened up the campus, it also opened up the staff in Morrie’s department, from the jeans and sandals they now wore when working to their view of the classroom as a living, breathing place. They chose discussions over lectures, experience over theory. They sent students to the Deep South for civil rights projects and to the inner city for fieldwork. They went to Washington for protest marches, and Morrie often rode the busses with his students. On one trip, he watched with gentle amusement as women in flowing skirts and love beads put flowers in soldiers’ guns, then sat on the lawn, holding hands, trying to levitate the Pentagon.
“They didn’t move it,” he later recalled, “but it was a nice try.”
One time, a group of black students took over Ford Hall on the Brandeis campus, draping it in a banner that read Malcolm X University. ford hall had chemistry labs, and some administration officials worried that these radicals were making bombs in the basement. Morrie knew better. He saw right to the core of the problem, which was human beings wanting to feel that they mattered.
The standoff lasted for weeks. And it might have gone on even longer if Morrie hadn’t been walking by the building when one of the protesters recognized him as a favorite teacher and yelled for him to come in through the window.
An hour later, Morrie crawled out through the window with a list of what the protesters wanted. He took the list to the university president, and the situation was diffused.
Morrie always made good peace.
At Brandeis, he taught classes about social psychology, mental illness and health, group process. They were light on what you’d now call “career skills” and heavy on “personal development.”
And because of this, business and law students today might look at Morrie as foolishly naive about his contributions. How much money did his students go on to make? How many big-time cases did they win?
Then again, how many business or law students ever visit their old professors once they leave? Morrie’s students did that all the time. And in his final months, they came back to him, hundreds of them, from Boston, New York, California, London, and
Switzerland; from corporate offices and inner city school programs. They called. They wrote. They drove hundreds of miles for a visit, a word, a smile.
“I’ve never had another teacher like you,” they all said.
As my visits with Morrie go on, I begin to read about death, how different cultures view the final passage. There is a tribe in the North American Arctic, for example, who believe that all things on earth have a soul that exists in a miniature form of the body that holds it—so that a deer has a tiny deer inside it, and a man has a tiny man inside him. When the large being dies, that tiny form lives on. It can slide into something being born nearby, or it can go to a temporary resting place in the sky, in the belly of a great feminine spirit, where it waits until the moon can send it back to earth.
Sometimes, they say, the moon is so busy with the new souls of the world that it disappears from the sky. That is why we have moonless nights. But in the end, the moon always returns, as do we all.
That is what they believe.
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When Morrie went with his father to try and get a job at the factory. He was majorly relieved to have been turned away. I think this tells us a lot about Morrie. He doesn’t believe in laboring away his life. He wants to help people. He wants to teach people and help them through life. To me, this means a lot more than laboring away in a factory for the rest of his life.
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“He would never allow himself to make money off of others,” this tells me that Morrie has great character because a lot of people in this world would take the money away from the people that genuinely deserve it.
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I think that this statement is beautiful and really makes people think about how much teachers really do for people. The main character feels this way because Morrie has affected him in such a positive way. What Morrie has done, even though he is dying, will live on forever because of his lifetime educational footprints he left behind.
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Many students dread going to school, let alone be told what to do by someone. People don’t understand the impact teachers make upon their student’s lives. Students spend five days a week, 6-7 hours a day, with their teachers. We see our teachers (in a normal world) more than we see our family. We spend at the minimum of 12 years of our lives with teachers. Teachers are the people who provide us with not only an education but things that will help us become better people. These life lessons stick with us forever.
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Morrie expresses how we all believe we will never die, but that is not the truth. We think we are infinte. Morries expresses how we should “prepare to die” and try to live as if today was our last. We should try to better ourselves into the person we want to be remembered for.
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Words of the Wiser are easy to identify in TUESDAYS WITH MORRIE as they seem to come from someone…wiser. We might look to these as THEMES.
One example comes out of this chapter as Morrie quotes the American poet, W. H. Auden who writes, “Love each other or perish.”
We get a sort of “you understood” here that I am supposed to love other people or prepare to perish with those other people. Or perish myself in the absence of the ability to express or give love.
This might be a social theme as Auden is not talking to me specifically but to a collective readership of his poems/poetry.
“Love each other or perish” could be the beginnings of a theme for the book coming out of this chapter.
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When Mitch says this Morrie is still remembering what it was like to be a teacher and how much he took joy in it and how much he misses it
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Morrie is dying. We all know this. We all know he doesn’t have that much time left. Every human needs physical affection. Human touch. Love. Whether it’s a pat on the back for a job well done, or a long hug that you never want to escape. Morrie longs for this touch even more now because he knows he won’t be able to experience it for much longer. While Morrie has family and so many friends to love and care for him, he still knows it won’t be for much longer. That’s the problem.
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Talking about his family and reminisce about the past could be good way for Morrie to come to terms with his upcoming death.
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I feel like if Morrie talks about his family with Mitch, it will help him feel better, even though he knows he won’t be with them very much more.
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I think this sentence can be used to subliminally suggest that Mitch sees Morrie as family. Morrie is within vicinity enough to be “around” him, and Mitch has made it quite clear that until recently his priorities had not been clear. This could also lead you to assume that he did not prioritize family as he should. Morrie could be his closet form.
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I think it is interesting how Morrie says," I think, in light of what we’ve been talking about all these weeks, family becomes even more important," I thought this was interesting because I just wonder what he had on his priority list above family that he would say they became EVEN MORE important
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Reading abut the ways in which more views the world makes me realize how much we all take for granted. When we are in good health we fail to see the beauty of everything around us. We take for granted are good health, our love, our family, our stability, and the Beautiful world that lives around us. It’s sad that we take all of these things for granted the majority of our life. Imagine how much happier we would all be if we realize just how important these things were now.
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I agree completely. When things are good, we forget about the little things and importance of family and the people around us. We take the best things around us for granted and assume we will have them forever. When something bad happens, you realize how good you really had it before and this can lead to a lot of regret.
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When a child is left without the foundation of a family while growing up, the child feels as if they have to force their way into love. I believe this is the point Morrie is trying to make. Without the loving embrace of family at a young age, kids grow up either touch starved, or hating physical contact. It is even a study therapists and psychologists look into. The signs of love hungry child are clear as day, and I feel as though Morrie knew this.
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Domestic is one of our thematic categories and includes subjects and topics that might include home, family, children.
These subjects do come out in this chapter, but watch this one that comes from Morrie himself. Words of the Wiser:
The fact is, there is no foundation, so secure ground upon which people may stand today if it isn’t the family."
So, the ties to domesticity are clear here, but how might this become a POLITICAL theme? A SOCIAL theme? A comment to the GENDER? A comment on RELIGION. All of these have vested interested in family issues and here Morrie suggests that this is foundational.
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Morrie, being as old and wise as he is, says something very accurate in a conversations he has with Mitch saying " If you don’t have the support and love and caring and concern that you get from a family, you don’t have much at all." It’s accurate because many of us human beings grow up without a farther figure or mother figure and become heartless sculptures roaming the earth, and there are some of them that grow up to be millionaires and have all this money and popularity surrounding them, yet they feel empty and unwanted because what they don’t realize is that money can not buy happiness or love.
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I feel like people try to distract themselves with materialistic things and popularity. At the end of the day, without some type of family love, life is a lot harder and you really don’t have much like Morrie said.
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“Love each other or perish”. This quote represents a lot of meaning behind it. In our lives we are only given one family, we cannot replace our blood line family. All families have issues and problems but at the end of the day we must love our family. If we don’t who may we have to love? As it is quoted “Love each other or perish.” Sometimes it does more damage to leave words unspoken or diminish a family relationship, it parishes. Typically it is best to love each other.
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Even though Morrie wasn’t the original source of this quote, it holds a great message. Love is one of, if not the most important thing in human society. Without it we are meaningless.
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Morrie basically says that he could not survive without his family. He is stronger because of his family.
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And most people are stronger because of their family. It’s the morphine we need and want
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Family doesn’t necessarily mean the one your born into. It could also be a close group of friends or a group who’s cared for you. That bonded group of people that sticks around, and checks on you is family. It could be blood family, since most people have a strong relationship with their family. Yet, some people have a negative relationship with their family, which leads to creating one from your closest friends. Not just friends who visit, but those who actually stay to help you, and check in on you every step of whatever path or issue you deal with.
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I think that since Morie is growing older he is relizing how much he will miss spending time with his family. Family is so important, they are they people that keep you afloat in life. They love you unconditionally no matter what. I think Morie is coming to the understanding that he does not have much longer with them so he is trying to make the most of his time.
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This quote represents the true meaning behind family. Although it is about love, it is much more than just love, “but letting others know there’s someone who is watching out for them.” I feel that sometimes there is a misconception with this. For example there is so much security in the feeling of perhaps having a bad day at school or work, but going home and having the support from home. Family is so much more important than love. Family is support and care, which in human nature, this is what we want and desire.
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I think Morrie getting closer to death makes him realize the importance of his family. He is clearly lonely, but seeing his children saddens him because he knows he will be leaving them soon. In a way it seems like Morrie is living through Mitch
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Morrie is lecturing Mitch about the love your family is able to give you. The love and security from your family is never going to be found in money or fame. Your family should be far more cherished than the materialistic things.
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Family is something so many people take for granted. Morrie has continuously recognized how different his mindset would be if he did not have a family. Like “A bird with broken wings.” More people need to recognize the importance of having people that will never leave your side. They’re there for a reason.
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Morrie consistently calls back to how hard and often Mitch is working, calling to how there are more important things than success at work and making money. I find it interesting how Morrie touches on Mitch’s extensive work as he is forgetting family and friends, until it seems too late, when he turns to Morrie in his final stages.
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In this paragraph Mitch wonders if he was in Morries shoes would he feel an unbearable amount of emptiness because he has no kids or wife. This is why I think family is very important not only for a feeling of company but for lots of mental and emotional health as well.
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I agree with Joe I think that family is very important in life, and we don’t realize it until it’s almost too late. I also that that people often worry about whether they will die alone, too.
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Morrie’s respect for his children and wanting for them to keep their lives moving whilst he is barred to his house shows just how much he loves them.
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No matter what is going on in your life, it could always be worse. Morrie is going through pain that most of us couldn’t imagine, but his kids being there is helping him so much. He is repaying them by reassuring them that they can still live their lives while helping him.
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I like how Morrie keeps it simple when talking about having children. Having children must be such a unique feeling that I’m sure every parent cherishes forever and won’t forget.
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I enjoyed reading this paragraph specifically because it’s so neutral when talking about something that many people would describe as the best experience of their life. Having kids is not for everyone, and it especially isn’t an easy decision for a lot of people. Morrie replies by saying “There’s nothing like it.” I find this to be very authentic because having kids is certainly an experience that you cannot get any other way. We can see Morrie get emotional here as we continue reading, understandably.
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Morrie is asked about having children again, to which he responds by showing extreme passion about parenting. However, for one of the first times Morrie shows pity, however not for himself. He is upset because he doesn’t not want to burden his children with the grief from his death.
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Even though in this section Morrie is talking about life, love, and family, he still ties it to death because it is inevitable in life.
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When someone starts a family, the painful thought of them leaving rarely comes up. You don’t have a baby and think, “I am going to love and nurture this child till the end of time, and one day, one of use will leave and the other will be struck with overwhelming emotions.” It is just not what happens, and yet, in the back of our minds, unspoken, the knowledge is there. The memories and joy are worth the pain, so silent the thought stays.
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In this section of the book, Mitch and Morrie talk about their family. Mitch is asking Morrie all these questions about his family and his life in the past living with them, then Morrie turns the questions onto Mitch who gives us flashbacks of his childhood with his family. We hear about his brother and how far apart they have drifted which shows the importance of family. I thought this was a really important line in the book because Morrie begins to cry thinking about his children and how he will be leaving them soon.
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Morrie always knew what would hit Mitch, in terms of an emotional space. Every time Morrie attempts to dig deeper into Mitch’s life, it is because he feels that Mitch could use some help, or simply just time dedicated to pondering a certain subject. I find Morrie’s ability to spot these weaknesses or areas of focus extremely symbolic and interesting.
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When Morrie begins to mention family, specifically Mitch’s younger brother, Mitch gets quiet. He changes the subject, which may suggest that the subject of family makes him uncomfortable. This furthers what I had inferred in Paragraph 86, sentence 3.
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In a similar way, my siblings used to mock each other about our different looks and personalities that varied greatly. However, even from a difference of outward appearance, family should be there for you, especially in crucial life-changing moments, such as Morrie’s children being there for him
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Jealousy can be a hateful emotion if it is let free, turning one against another. Maybe this jealousy is what caused Mitch such over whelming guilt later in life when his brother got sick. The private jealousy that he couldn’t control, but now, how can you be jealous and angry of a sick person?
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It’s odd that his brother and uncle got the same type of rare cancer. I also find it odd that Mitch always felt the cancer coming and thought it should be him. It seems like he feels guilty that his brother got the cancer and not him.
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I noticed this as well. It’s interesting, makes me wonder if its hereditary is some way. I have also heard pancreatic cancer is one of the absolute worse cancers to get. It is very aggressive, generally very deadly.
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You can really see that Mitch felt a lot of guilt when his family found out his brother had pancreatic cancer. Especially when he had convinced himself for years that it would be himself. How could you not feel guilt? Well, to me that answer would be that we can’t know what is to come. As people, there is no way he could have know he was going to have cancer or any deadly disease.
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Although Morrie needed his family by his side while he was dying, Mitch’s brother did not feel the same way. Mitch’s brother did not want to be with nor speak to his family during his battle with cancer. Even though this may seem odd to many people, I can see where he is coming from. Sometimes being alone during hard times can help to figure out your feelings. Although family is always good to have by your side, some alone time can also benefit.
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It was interesting that his brother did not want any of his family around to help him through this tough, while Morrie said family was the only reason he has gotten through his past years with the disease.
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I feel as if this paragraph gives us a glimpse of why Mitch may work so much. Afraid of not being in control and afraid of change, but work allows him to be in control.
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