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.
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.
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?
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, even 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.