Tuesdays With Morrie Page 12

  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?

  [signed] 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, 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 pen
ciled 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.