The Tenth Tuesday We Talk About Marriage
I brought a visitor to meet Morrie. My wife.
He had been asking me since the first day I came. “When do I meet Janine?” “When are you bringing her?” I’d always had excuses until a few days earlier, when I called his house to see how he was doing.
It took a while for Morrie to get to the receiver. And when he did, I could hear the fumbling as someone held it to his ear. He could no longer lift a phone by himself. “Hiiiiii,” he gasped.
You doing okay, Coach?
I heard him exhale. “Mitch … your coach … isn’t having such a great day …
His sleeping time was getting worse. He needed oxygen almost nightly now, and his coughing spells had become frightening. One cough could last an hour, and he never knew if he’d be able to stop. He always said he would die when the disease got his lungs. I shuddered when I thought how close death was.
I’ll see you on Tuesday, I said. You’ll have a better day then.
“Mitch.”
Yeah?
“Is your wife there with you?” She was sitting next to me.
“Put her on. I want to hear her voice.”
Now, I am married to a woman blessed with far more intuitive kindness than I. Although she had never met Morrie, she took the phone –I would have shaken my head and whispered, “I’m not here! I’m not here!”—and in a minute, she was connecting with my old professor as if they’d known each other since college. I sensed this, even though all I heard on my end was “Uh-huh … Mitch told me … oh, thank you …
When she hung up, she said, “I’m coming next trip.” And that was that.
Now we sat in his office, surrounding him in his recliner. Morrie, by his own admission, was a harmless flirt, and while he often had to stop for coughing, or to use the commode, he seemed to find new reserves of energy with Janine in the room. He looked at photos from our wedding, which Janine had brought along.
“You are from Detroit?” Morrie said. Yes, Janine said.
“I taught in Detroit for one year, in the late forties. I remember a funny story about that.”
He stopped to blow his nose. When he fumbled with the tissue, I held it in place and he blew weakly into it. I squeezed it lightly against his nostrils, then pulled it off, like a mother does to a child in a car seat.
“Thank you, Mitch.” He looked at Janine. “My helper, this one is.”
Janine smiled.
“Anyhow. My story. There were a bunch of sociologists at the university, and we used to play poker with other staff members, including this guy who was a surgeon. One night, after the game, he said, ‘Morrie, I want to come see you work.’ I said fine. So he came to one of my classes and watched me teach.
“After the class was over he said, ‘All right, now, how would you like to see me work? I have an operation tonight.’ I wanted to return the favor, so I said okay.
“He took me up to the hospital. He said, ‘Scrub down, put on a mask, and get into a gown.’ And next thing I knew, I was right next to him at the operating table. There was this woman, the patient, on the table, naked from the waist down. And he took a knife and went zip just like that! Well …
Morrie lifted a finger and spun it around.
“… I started to go like this. I’m about to faint. All the blood. Yech. The nurse next to me said, ‘What’s the matter, Doctor?’ and I said, ‘I’m no damn doctor! Get me out of here!’”
We laughed, and Morrie laughed, too, as hard as he could, with his limited breathing. It was the first time in weeks that I could recall him telling a story like this. How strange, I thought, that he nearly fainted once from watching someone else’s illness, and now he was so able to endure his own.
Connie knocked on the door and said that Morrie’s lunch was ready. It was not the carrot soup and vegetable cakes and Greek pasta I had brought that morning from Bread and Circus. Although I tried to buy the softest of foods now, they were still beyond Morrie’s limited strength to chew and swallow. He was eating mostly liquid supplements, with perhaps a bran muffin tossed in until it was mushy and easily digested. Charlotte would puree almost everything in a blender now. He was taking food through a straw. I still shopped every week and walked in with bags to show him, but it was more for the look on his face than anything else. When I opened the refrigerator, I would see an overflow of containers. I guess I was hoping that one day we would go back to eating a real lunch together and I could watch the sloppy way in which he talked while chewing, the food spilling happily out of his mouth. This was a foolish hope.
“So … Janine,” Morrie said. She smiled.
“You are lovely. Give me your hand.”
She did.
“Mitch says that you’re a professional singer.” Yes, Janine said.
“He says you’re great.”
Oh, she laughed. N0. He just says that.
Morrie raised his eyebrows. “Will you sing something for me?”
Now, I have heard people ask this of Janine for almost as long as I have known her. When people find out you sing for a living, they always say, “Sing something for us.” Shy about her talent, and a perfectionist about conditions, Janine never did. She would politely decline. Which is what I expected now.
Which is when she began to sing:
“The very thought of you
and I forget to do
the little ordinary things
that everyone ought to do …”
It was a 1930s standard, written by Ray Noble, and Janine sang it sweetly, looking straight at Morrie. I was amazed, once again, at his ability t0 draw emotion from people who otherwise kept it locked away. Morrie closed his eyes to absorb the notes. As my wife’s loving voice filled the room, a crescent smile appeared 0n his face. And while his body was stiff as a sandbag, you could almost see him dancing inside it.
“I see your face in every flower,
your eyes in stars above,
it’s just the thought of you,
the very thought of you,
my love …”
When she finished, Morrie opened his eyes and tears rolled down his cheeks. In all the years I have listened to my wife sing, I never heard her the way he did at that moment.
Marriage. Almost everyone I knew had a problem with it. Some had problems getting into it, some had problems getting out. My generation seemed t0 struggle with the commitment, as if it were an alligator from some murky swamp. I had gotten used to attending weddings, congratulating the couple, and feeling only mild surprise when I saw the groom a few years later sitting in a restaurant with a younger woman whom he introduced as a friend. “You know, I’m separated from so-and-so …” he would say.
Why do we have such problems? I asked Morrie about this. Having waited seven years before I proposed t0 Janine, I wondered if people my age were being more careful than those who came before us, 0r simply more selfish?
“Well, I feel sorry for your generation,” Morrie said. “In this culture, it’s so important to find a loving relationship with someone because so much of the culture does not give you that. But the poor kids today, either they’re too selfish to take part in a real loving relationship, or they rush into marriage and then six months later, they get divorced. They don’t know what they want in a partner. They don’t know who they are themselves—so how can they know who they’re marrying?”
He sighed. Morrie had counseled so many unhappy lovers in his years as a professor. “It’s sad, because a loved one is so important. You realize that, especially when you’re in a time like I am, when you’re not doing so well. Friends are great, but friends are not going to be here on a night when you’re coughing and can’t sleep and someone has to sit up all night with you, comfort you, try to be helpful.”
Charlotte and Morrie, who met as students, had been married forty-four years. I watched them together now, when she would remind him of his medication, or come in and stroke his neck, or talk about one of their sons. They worked as a team, often needing no more than a silent glance to understand what the other was thinking. Charlotte was a private person, different from Morrie, but I knew how much he respected her, because sometimes when we spoke, he would say, “Charlotte might be uncomfortable with me revealing that,” and he would end the conversation. It was the only time Morrie held anything back.
“I’ve learned this much about marriage,” he said now. “You get tested. You find out who you are, who the other person is, and how you accommodate or don’t.”
Is there some kind of rule to know if a marriage is going to work?
Morrie smiled. “Things are not that simple, Mitch.” I know.
“Still,” he said, “there are a few rules I know to be true about love and marriage: If you don’t respect the other person, you’re gonna have a lot of trouble. If you don’t know how to compromise, you’re gonna have a lot of trouble. If you can’t talk openly about what goes on between you, you’re gonna have a lot of trouble. And if you don’t have a common set of values in life, you’re gonna have a lot of trouble. Your values must be alike.
“And the biggest one of those values, Mitch?”‘
Yes?
“Your belief in the importance of your marriage.”
He sniffed, then closed his eyes for a moment.
“Personally,” he sighed, his eyes still closed, “I think marriage is a very important thing to do, and you’re missing a hell of a lot if you don’t try it.”
He ended the subject by quoting the poem he believed in like a prayer: “Love each other or perish.”
Okay, question, I say to Morrie. His bony fingers hold his glasses across his chest, which rises and falls with each labored breath.
“What’s the question?” lie says.
Remember the Book of Job?
“From the Bible?”
Right. Job is a good mare, but God makes him suffer. To test his faith.
“I remember.”
Takes away everything lie has, his house, his money, his family …
“His health.”
Makes him sick.
“To test his faith.”
Right. To test his faith. So, I’m wondering …
“What are you wondering?”
What you think about that?
Morrie coughs violently. His hands quiver as he drops them by his side.
“I think, “he says, smiling, “God overdid it.”
The Eleventh Tuesday We Talk About Our Culture
“Hit him harder.”
I slapped Morrie’s back.
“Harder.”
I slapped him again.
“Near his shoulders … now down lower.”
Morrie, dressed in pajama bottoms, lay in bed on his side, his head flush against the pillow, his mouth open. The physical therapist was showing me how to bang loose the poison in his lungs—which he needed done regularly now, to keep it from solidifying, to keep him breathing.
“I … always knew … you wanted … to hit me …” Morrie gasped.
Yeah, I joked as I rapped my fist against the alabaster skin of his back. This is for that B you gave me sophomore year! Whack!
We all laughed, a nervous laughter that comes when the devil is within earshot. It would have been cute, this little scene, were it not what we all knew it was, the final calisthenics before death. Morrie’s disease was now dangerously close to his surrender spot, his lungs. He had been predicting he would die from choking, and I could not imagine a more terrible way to go. Sometimes he would close his eyes and try to draw the air up into his mouth and nostrils, and it seemed as if he were trying to lift an anchor.
Outside, it was jacket weather, early October, the leaves clumped in piles on the lawns around West Newton. Morrie’s physical therapist had come earlier in the day, and I usually excused myself when nurses or specialists had business with him. But as the weeks passed and our time ran down, I was increasingly less self-conscious about the physical embarrassment. I wanted to be there. I wanted to observe everything. This was not like me, but then, neither were a lot of things that had happened these last few months in Morrie’s house.
So I watched the therapist work on Morrie in the bed, pounding the back of his ribs, asking if he could feel the congestion loosening within him. And when she took
a break, she asked if I wanted to try it. I said yes. Morrie, his face on the pillow, gave a little smile.
“Not too hard,” he said. “I’m an old man.”
I drummed on his back and sides, moving around, as she instructed. I hated the idea of Morrie’s lying in bed under any circumstances (his last aphorism, “When you’re in bed, you’re dead,” rang in my ears), and curled on his side, he was so small, so withered, it was more a boy’s body than a man’s. I saw the paleness of his skin, the stray white hairs, the way his arms hung limp and helpless. I thought about how much time we spend trying to shape our bodies, lifting weights, crunching sit-ups, and in the end, nature takes it away from us anyhow. Beneath my fingers, I felt the loose flesh around Morrie’s bones, and I thumped him hard, as instructed. The truth is, I was pounding on his back when I wanted to be hitting the walls.
“Mitch?” Morrie gasped, his voice jumpy as a jackhammer as I pounded on him.
Uh-huh?
“When did … I … give you … a B?”
Morrie believed in the inherent good of people. But he also saw what they could become.
“People are only mean when they’re threatened,” he said later that day, “and that’s what our culture does. That’s what our economy does. Even people who have jobs in our economy are threatened, because they worry about losing them. And when you get threatened, you start looking out only for yourself. You start making money a god. It is all part of this culture.”
He exhaled. “Which is why I don’t buy into it.”
I nodded at him and squeezed his hand. We held hands regularly now. This was another change for me. Things that before would have made me embarrassed or squeamish were now routinely handled. The catheter bag, connected to the tube inside him and filled with greenish waste fluid, lay by my foot near the leg of his chair. A few months earlier, it might have disgusted me; it was inconsequential now. So was the smell of the room after Morrie had used the commode. He did not have the luxury of moving from place to place, of closing a bathroom door behind him, spraying some air freshener when he left. There was his bed, there was his chair, and that was his life. If my life were squeezed into such a thimble, I doubt I could make it smell any better.
“Here’s what I mean by building your own little subculture,” Morrie said. “I don’t mean you disregard every rule of your community. I don’t go around naked, for example. I don’t run through red lights. The little things, I can obey. But the big things—how we think, what we value—those you must choose yourself. You can’t let anyone—or any society determine those for you.
“Take my condition. The things I am supposed to be embarrassed about now—not being able to walk, not being able to wipe my ass, waking up some mornings wanting to cry—there is nothing innately embarrassing or shaming about them.
“It’s the same for women not being thin enough, or men not being rich enough. It’s just what our culture would have you believe. Don’t believe it.”
I asked Morrie why he hadn’t moved somewhere else when he was younger.
“Where?”
I don’t know. South America. New Guinea. Someplace not as selfish as America.
“Every society has its own problems,” Morrie said, lifting his eyebrows, the closest he could come to a shrug. “The way to do it, I think, isn’t to run away. You have to work at creating your own culture.
“Look, no matter where you live, the biggest defect we human beings have is our shortsightedness. We don’t see what we could be. We should be looking at our potential, stretching ourselves into everything we can become. But if you’re surrounded by people who say ‘I want mine now,’ you end up with a few people with everything and a military to keep the poor ones from rising up and stealing it.”
Morrie looked over my shoulder to the far window. Sometimes you could hear a passing truck or a whip of the wind. He gazed for a moment at his neighbors’ houses, then continued.
“The problem, Mitch, is that we don’t believe we are as much alike as we are. Whites and blacks, Catholics and Protestants, men and women. If we saw each other as more alike, we might be very eager to join in one big human family in this world, and to care about that family the way we care about our own.
“But believe me, when you are dying, you see it is true. We all have the same beginning—birth—and we all have the same end—death. So how different can we be?
“Invest in the human family. Invest in people. Build a little community of those you love and who love you.”
He squeezed my hand gently. I squeezed back harder. And like that carnival contest where you bang a hammer and watch the disk rise up the pole, I could almost see my body heat rise up Morrie’s chest and neck into his cheeks and eyes. He smiled.
“In the beginning of life, when we are infants, we need others to survive, right? And at the end of life, when you get like me, you need others to survive, right?”
His voice dropped to a whisper. “But here’s the secret: in between, we need others as well.”
Later that afternoon, Connie and I went into the bedroom to watch the O. J. Simpson verdict. It was a tense scene as the principals all turned to face the jury, Simpson, in his blue suit, surrounded by his small army of lawyers, the prosecutors who wanted him behind bars just a few feet away. When the foreman read the verdict“Not guilty”—Connie shrieked.
“Oh my God!”
We watched as Simpson hugged his lawyers. We listened as the commentators tried to explain what it all
meant. We saw crowds of blacks celebrating in the streets outside the courthouse, and crowds of whites sitting stunned inside restaurants. The decision was being hailed as momentous, even though murders take place every day. Connie went out in the hall. She had seen enough.
I heard the door to Morrie’s study close. I stared at the TV set. Everyone in the world is watching this thing, I told myself. Then, from the other room, I heard the ruffling of Morrie’s being lifted from his chair and I smiled. As “The Trial of the Century” reached its dramatic conclusion, my old professor was sitting on the toilet.
It is 1979, a basketball game in the Brandeis gym. The team is doing well, and the student section begins a chant, “We’re number one! We’re number one!” Morrie is sitting nearby. He is puzzled by the cheer. At one point, in the midst of “We’re number one!” he rises and yells, “What’s wrong with being number two?”
The students look at him. They stop chanting. He sits down, smiling and triumphant.
The Audiovisual, Part Three
The “Nightline” crew came back for its third and final visit. The whole tenor of the thing was different now. Less like an interview, more like a sad farewell. Ted Koppel had called several times before coming up, and he had asked Morrie, “Do you think you can handle it?”
Morrie wasn’t sure he could. “I’m tired all the time now, Ted. And I’m choking a lot. If I can’t say something, will you say it for me?”
Koppel said sure. And then the normally stoic anchor added this: “If you don’t want to do it, Morrie, it’s okay. I’ll come up and say good-bye anyhow.”
Later, Morrie would grin mischievously and say, “I’m getting to him.” And he was. Koppel now referred to Morrie as “a friend.” My old professor had even coaxed compassion out of the television business.
For the interview, which took place on a Friday afternoon, Morrie wore the same shirt he’d had on the day before. He changed shirts only every other day at this point, and this was not the other day, so why break routine?
Unlike the previous two Koppel-Schwartz sessions, this one was conducted entirely within Morrie’s study, where Morrie had become a prisoner of his chair. Koppel, who kissed my old professor when he first saw him, now had to squeeze in alongside the bookcase in order to be seen in the camera’s lens.
Before they started, Koppel asked about the disease’s progression. “How bad is it, Morrie?”
Morrie weakly lifted a hand, halfway up his belly. This was as far as he could go.
Koppel had his answer.
The camera rolled, the third and final interview. Koppel asked if Morrie was more afraid now that death was near. Morrie said no; to tell the truth, he was less afraid. He said he was letting go of some of the outside world, not having the newspaper read to him as much, not paying as much attention to mail, instead listening more to music and watching the leaves change color through his window.
There were other people who suffered from ALS, Morrie knew, some of them famous, such as Stephen Hawking, the brilliant physicist and author of A Brief History of Time . He lived with a hole in his throat, spoke through a computer synthesizer, typed words by batting his eyes as a sensor picked up the movement.
This was admirable, but it was not the way Morrie wanted to live. He told Koppel he knew when it would be time to say good-bye.
“For me, Ted, living means I can be responsive to the other person. It means I can show my emotions and my feelings. Talk to them. Feel with them …”
He exhaled. “When that is gone, Morrie is gone.”
They talked like friends. As he had in the previous two interviews, Koppel asked about the “old ass wipe test”—hoping, perhaps, for a humorous response. But Morrie was too tired even to grin. He shook his head. “When I sit on the commode, I can no longer sit up straight. I’m listing all the time, so they have to hold me. When I’m done they have to wipe me. That is how far it’s gotten.”
He told Koppel he wanted to die with serenity. He shared his latest aphorism: “Don’t let go too soon, but don’t hang on too long.”
Koppel nodded painfully. Only six months had passed between the first “Nightline” show and this one, but Morrie Schwartz was clearly a collapsed form. He had decayed before a national TV audience, a miniseries of a death. But as his body rotted, his character shone even more brightly.
Toward the end of the interview, the camera zoomed in on Morrie-Koppel was not even in the picture, only his voice was heard from outside it—and the anchor asked if my old professor had anything he wanted to say to the millions of people he had touched. Although he did not mean it this way, I couldn’t help but think of a condemned man being asked for his final words.
“Be compassionate,” Morrie whispered. “And take responsibility for each other. If we only learned those lessons, this world would be so much better a place.”
He took a breath, then added his mantra: “Love each other or die.”
The interview was ended. But for some reason, the cameraman left the film rolling, and a final scene was caught on tape.
“You did a good job,” Koppel said.
Morrie smiled weakly.
“I gave you what I had,” he whispered. “You always do.”
“Ted, this disease is knocking at my spirit. But it will not get my spirit. It’ll get my body. It will not get my spirit.”
Koppel was near tears. “You done good.”
“You think so?” Morrie rolled his eyes toward the ceiling. “I’m bargaining with Him up there now. I’m asking Him, ‘Do I get to be one of the angels?’”
It was the first time Morrie admitted talking to God.
The Twelfth Tuesday We Talk About Forgiveness
“Forgive yourself before you die. Then forgive others.”
This was a few days after the “Nightline” interview. The sky was rainy and dark, and Morrie was beneath a blanket. I sat at the far end of his chair, holding his bare feet. They were callused and curled, and his toenails were yellow. I had a small jar of lotion, and I squeezed some into my hands and began to massage his ankles.
It was another of the things I had watched his helpers do for months, and now, in an attempt to hold on to what I could of him, I had volunteered to do it myself. The disease had left Morrie without the ability even to wiggle his toes, yet he could still feel pain, and massages helped relieve it. Also, of course, Morrie liked being held and touched. And at this point, anything I could do to make him happy, I was going to do.
“Mitch,” he said, returning to the subject of forgiveness. “There is no point in keeping vengeance or stubbornness. These things”—he sighed—”these things I so regret in my life. Pride. Vanity. Why do we do the things we do?”
The importance of forgiving was my question. I had seen those movies where the patriarch of the family is on his death bed and he calls for his estranged son so that he can make peace before he goes. I wondered if Morrie had any of that inside him, a sudden need to say “I’m sorry” before he died?
Morrie nodded. “Do you see that sculpture?” He tilted his head toward a bust that sat high on a shelf against the far wall of his office. I had never really noticed it before. Cast in bronze, it was the face of a man in his early forties, wearing a necktie, a tuft of hair falling across his forehead.
“That’s me,” Morrie said. “A friend of mine sculpted that maybe thirty years ago. His name was Norman. We used to spend so much time together. We went swimming. We took rides to New York. He had me over to his house in Cambridge, and he sculpted that bust of me down in his basement. It took several weeks to do it, but he really wanted to get it right.”
I studied the face. How strange to see a three-dimensional Morrie, so healthy, so young, watching over us as we spoke. Even in bronze, he had a whimsical look, and I thought this friend had sculpted a little spirit as well.
“Well, here’s the sad part of the story,” Morrie said. “Norman and his wife moved away to Chicago. A little while later, my wife, Charlotte, had to have a pretty serious operation. Norman and his wife never got in touch with us. I know they knew about it. Charlotte and I were very hurt because they never called to see how she was. So we dropped the relationship.
“Over the years, I met Norman a few times and he always tried to reconcile, but I didn’t accept it. I wasn’t satisfied with his explanation. I was prideful. I shrugged him off. “
His voice choked.
“Mitch … a few years ago … he died of cancer. I feel so sad. I never got to see him. I never got to forgive. It pains me now so much …”
He was crying again, a soft and quiet cry, and because his head was back, the tears rolled off the side of his face before they reached his lips.
Sorry, I said.
“Don’t be,” he whispered. “Tears are okay.”
I continued rubbing lotion into his lifeless toes. He wept for a few minutes, alone with his memories.
“It’s not just other people we need to forgive, Mitch,” he finally whispered. We also need to forgive
ourselves.”
Ourselves?
“Yes. For all the things we didn’t do. All the things we should have done. You can’t get stuck on the regrets of what should have happened. That doesn’t help you when you get to where I am.
“I always wished I had done more with my work; I wished I had written more books. I used to beat myself up over it. Now I see that never did any good. Make peace. You need to make peace with yourself and everyone around you.”
I leaned over and dabbed at the tears with a tissue. Morrie flicked his eyes open and closed. His breathing was audible, like a light snore.
“Forgive yourself. Forgive others. Don’t wait, Mitch. Not everyone gets the time I’m getting. Not everyone is as lucky.”
I tossed the tissue into the wastebasket and returned to his feet. Lucky? I pressed my thumb into his hardened flesh and he didn’t even feel it.
“The tension of opposites, Mitch. Remember that? Things pulling in different directions?”
I remember.
“I mourn my dwindling time, but I cherish the chance it gives me to make things right.”
We sat there for a while, quietly, as the rain splattered against the windows. The hibiscus plant behind his head was still holding on, small but firm.
“Mitch,” Morrie whispered.
Uh-huh?
I rolled his toes between my fingers, lost in the task.
“Look at me.”
I glanced up and saw the most intense look in his eyes.
“I don’t know why you came back to me. But I want to say this …
He paused, and his voice choked.
“If I could have had another son, I would have liked it to be you.”
I dropped my eyes, kneading the dying flesh of his feet between my fingers. For a moment, I felt afraid, as if accepting his words would somehow betray my own father. But when I looked up, I saw Morrie smiling through tears and I knew there was no betrayal in a moment like this.
All I was afraid of was saying good-bye.
“I’ve picked a place to be buried.”
Where is that?
“Not far from here. On a hill, beneath a tree, overlooking a pond. Very serene. A good place to think.”
Are you planning on thinking there?
“I’m planning on being dead there.”
He chuckles. I chuckle.
“Will you visit?” Visit?
‘Just come and talk. Make it a Tuesday. You always come on Tuesdays.”
We’re Tuesday people.
“Right. Tuesday people. Come to talk, then?”
He has grown so weak so fast.
“Look at me,” he says.
I’m looking.
“You’ll come to my grave? To tell me your problems?”
My problems?
“Yes.”
And you’ll give me answers?
“I’ll give you what I can. Don’t I always?”
I picture his grave, on the hill, overlooking the pond, some little nine foot piece of earth where they will place him, cover him with dirt, put a stone on top. Maybe in a few weeks? Maybe in a few days? I see mysef sitting there alone, arms across my knees, staring into space.
It won’t be the same, I say, not being able to hear you talk.
“Ah, talk …”
He closes his eyes and smiles.
“Tell you what. After I’m dead, you talk. And I’ll listen.”