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- ...by a window in the study where he could watch a small hibiscus plant shed its pink leaves.
- The class met on Tuesdays. It began after breakfast. The subject was The Meaning of Life. It was taught from experience.
- No books were required, yet many topics were covered, including love, work, community, family, aging, forgiveness, and, finally, death. The last lecture was brief, only a few words. A funeral was held in lieu of graduation.
- It is the late spring of 1979, a hot, sticky, Saturday afternoon.
- He is a small man who takes small steps, as if a strong wind could, at any time, whisk him up into the clouds. In his graduation day robe, he looks like a cross between a biblical prophet and a Christmas elf. He has sparkling blue-green eyes, thinning silver hair that spills onto his forehead, big ears, a triangular nose, and tufts of graying eyebrows.
- "Mitch, you are one of the good ones," he says, admiring the briefcase. Then he hugs me. I feel his thin arms around my back. I am taller than he is, and when he holds me, I feel awkward, older, as if I were the parent and he were the child.
- He would close his eyes & with a blissful smile begin to move to his own sense of rhythm... Morrie danced by himself.
- He'd do the lindy to Jimi Hendrix. He twisted and twirled, he waved his arms like a conductor on amphetamines, until sweat was dripping down the middle of his back.
- But Morrie, who was always more in touch with his insides than the rest of us, knew something else was wrong.
- ...the doctor gave them some information on ALS, little pamphlets, as if they were opening a bank account. Outside, the sun was shining & people were going about their business. A woman ran to put money in the parking meter. Another carried groceries. Charlotte had a million thoughts in her head... My old professor, meanwhile, was stunned by the normalcy of the day around him. Shouldn't the world stop? Don't they know what has happened to me? But the world did not stop, it took no notice at all, and as Morrie pulled weakly on the car door, he felt as if he were dropping into a hole.
- Instead, he hobbled into the classroom, his home for more than 30 yrs.
- ALS is like a lit candle: it melts your nerves & leaves your body a pile a wax... By the end, if you are still alive, you are breathing through a tube in a hole in your throat, while your soul, perfectly awake, is imprisoned inside a limp husk, perhaps able to blink, or cluck a tongue, like something from a science fiction movie, the man frozen inside his own flesh. This takes no more than 5 years from the day you contract the disease.
- Do I wither up and disappear, or do I make the best of my time left? he had asked himself. He would not wither. He would not be ashamed of dying. Instead, he would make death his final project, the centerpoint of his days.
- Nurses came to his house to work with Morrie's withering legs, to keep the muscles active, bending them back and forth as if pumping water from a well.
- He met with meditation teachers, and closed his eyes and narrowed his thoughts until his world shrunk down to a single breath, in and out, in and out.
- "What a waste," he said. "All those people saying all those wonderful things, and Irv never got to hear any of it."
jul 12 2020 ∞
jul 12 2020 +
jul 12 2020 +