Counting life’s moments had led, inevitably, to counting them down.
He tolerated it until he could tolerate it no more.
A tension of opposites, like a pull on a rubber band. And most of us live somewhere in the middle.
A human textbook. Study me in my slow and patient demise. Watch what happens to me. Learn with me. Morrie would walk that final bridge between life and death, and narrate the trip.
The curtain has just come down on childhood.
Katherine would later reason that if anything were going to take away her beautiful, funny, precious older sister, it would be that her heart was so big, it exploded.
You can’t fit the Lord in a box. But you can gather stories, tradition, wisdom, and in time, you needn’t lower the shelf; God is already nearer to thee.
Those who sat with him saw his eyes go moist when they spoke about something horrible, or crinkle in delight when they told him a really bad joke. He was always ready to openly display the emotion so often missing from my baby boomer generation. We are great at small talk: ‘What do you do?’ ‘Where do you live?’ But really listening to someone – without trying to sell them something, pick them up, recruit them, or get some kind of status in return – how often do we get this anymore?
All right. In that final minute, I would say, ‘Look, Lord, I’ve done X amount of good stuff on earth. I have tried to follow your teachings and to pass them on. I have loved my family. I’ve been part of a community. And I have been, I think, fairly good to people. “‘So, Heavenly Father, for all this, what is my reward?”’ And what do you think God will say? He smiled. “He’ll say, ‘Reward?
I felt as if time were suddenly precious, water going down an open drain, and I could not move quickly enough.
Holding him like that moved me in a way I cannot describe, except to say I felt the seeds of death inside his shrivelling frame, and as I laid him in his chair, adjusting his head on the pillows, I had the coldest realisation that our time was running out.
How useful it would be to put a daily limit on self-pity. Just a few tearful minutes, then.
He told his friends that if they really wanted to help him, they would treat him not with sympathy but with visits, phone calls, a sharing of their problems – the way they had always... because Morrie had always been a wonderful listener.
There is no formula to relationships. They have to be negotiated in loving ways, with room for both parties, what they want and what they need, what they can do and what their life is like. “In business, people negotiate to win. They negotiate to get what they want. Maybe you’re too used to that. Love is different. Love is when you are as concerned about someone else’s situation as you are about your own.
Only God can write the end of your story.” “God has left me alone,” Dor said. The old man shook his head. “You were never alone.
I wondered, now that his days were dwindling, how important ritual still was. “Vital,” he said. But why? Deep inside, you know your convictions. “Mitch,” he said, “faith is about doing. You are how you act, not just how you believe.
We forget that ‘our’ time is linked to others’ times. We come from one. We return to one. That’s how a connected universe makes sense.
But science only knows what it knows. And because it lacks an understanding of the next world, it cannot explain that the flash before your eyes is actually a peek behind the curtain of heaven, where your life and the lives of all you’ve touched are on the same plane, so that seeing one memory is the same as seeing them all.
One of my disciples, a lanky saxophonist named Sonny Rollins, played his horn for three years on a bridge in New York City, his tender jazz melodies wafting between the traffic noises. I would pause there often, on the girders, just to listen. Or.
The Captain grinned. “The way I see it, that’s what we’re getting here, soldier. That’s what heaven is. You get to make sense of your yesterdays.