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.
If some mystical clarity of thought came when you looked death in the eye, then I knew Morrie wanted to share it. And I wanted to remember it for as long as I could.
Now. My turn. Look, if you say that science will eventually prove there is no God, on that I must differ. No matter how small they take it back, to a tadpole, to an atom, there is always something they can’t explain, something that created it all at the end of the search.
Why suffer in front of so many people?
When a baby comes into the world, its hands are clenched, right? Like this?” He made a fist. “Why? Because a baby, not knowing any better, wants to grab everything, to say, ‘The whole world is mine.’ “But when an old person dies, how does he do so? With his hands open. Why? Because he has learned the lesson.” What lesson? I asked. He stretched open his empty fingers. “We can take nothing with us.
It is said that the earliest spark for the telephone came when Alexander Bell was still in his teens. He noticed how, if he sang a certain note near an open piano, the string of that note would vibrate, as if singing back to him. He sang an A; the A string shook. The idea of connecting voices through a wire was born.
Lovely, isn’t it?” What? “Life,” he said.
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.
Instead, he would make death his final project, the center point of his days.
Eddie never said anything he felt that deeply.
We think because we’re human we’re somethin above nature... we are not. Everything that gets born, dies.
When my mother entered, wearing her nurse’s outfit, her arms full of magazines, we must have said, “Hi Mom” too quickly, because she immediately became suspicious. You can see that in your mother’s face right away, that “What did you kids do?” look.
When I give my time, when I can make someone smile after they were feeling sad, it’s as close to healthy as I ever feel.
Sacrifice,” the Captain said. “You made one. I made one. We all make them. But you were angry over yours. You kept thinking about what you lost. You didn’t get it. Sacrifice is a part of life. It’s supposed to be. It’s not something to regret. It’s something to aspire to. Little sacrifices. Big sacrifices. A mother works so her son can go to school. A daughter moves home to take care of her sick father.
Our words will always be sincere, our embraces will be tight. We will never wallow in the agony of ‘I could have, I should have.’ We can sleep in a storm. “And when it’s time, our good-byes will be complete.
Remember what I said about finding a meaningful life? I wrote it down, but now I can recite it: Devote yourself to loving others, devote yourself to your community around you, and devote yourself to creating something that gives you purpose and meaning. “You notice” he added, grinning, “there’s nothing in there about a salary.
Only an open heart will allow you to float equally between people.
At certain moments, when death is close, the veils pull back between this world and the next. Heaven and earth overlay. When they do, it is possible to glimpse certain souls already departed. You can see them awaiting your arrival. And they can see you coming.
What a waste... All those people saying all those wonderful things, and Irv never got to hear any of it.
Trees spend all day looking up at God.