People lament that if their loved ones had been born fifty years later, they might have survived what killed them. But perhaps what killed them is what led someone to find a cure.
I split my adolescence between the pulpy smell of books, which was my mother’s passion, and the leathery smell of baseball gloves, which was my father’s.
But a clock ticks for all of us, silently, somewhere.
I had told him I was searching for my keys, that’s what had taken me so long in the car, and I squeezed him tighter, as if I could crush my little lie.
My days were full, yet I remained, much of the time, unsatisfied. What happened to me?” – Mitch.
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.
Unlike any man before him, Dor was being allowed to exist without getting older, to not use a single breath of the numbered breaths of his life. But inside, Dor was broken. Not aging is not the same as living, and without human contact, his soul dried up.
He was so accustomed to being correct in his judgments. Had he been spared the smaller mistakes in life only to make the biggest one at the end?
Man alone measures time. Man alone chimes the hour.
In the astronomy of high school life, Sarah would never have entered his orbit.
Death is as natural as life. It’s part of the deal we made. Everything that gets born, dies. As long as we love each other, and remember the feeling of love we had, we can die without ever really going away. All the love you created is still there. All the memories are still there. You live on – in the hearts of all those you have touched and nurtured while you were here.
This is how a legacy is built. One memory at a time.
If earthly mortals were being contacted by souls in heaven, Tess, a Catholic, had been the first.
Why is it so hard to think about dying? “Because,” Morrie continued, “most of us all walk around as if we’re sleepwalking. We really don’t experience the world fully, because we’re half-asleep, doing things we automatically think we have to do.” 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.
As happens with all miracles, once life goes on, those who believe retell them with wonder. Those who do not, do not.
Well, the truth is, if you really listen to that bird on your shoulder, if you accept that you can die at any time – then you might not be as ambitious as you are.
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.
Then you came along, Chika. And maybe because I’m older now, or maybe because your eyes were so much wider than mine, or maybe because it’ssimply different when the child is in your care, something stirred. I began to lean over to see tiny miracles the way you saw them. Finding Chika.
On the outside, he looked the same as he had that morning: a squat, barrel-chested old man in a cap and shorts and a brown maintenance jersey. But he was limber. So limber, in fact, he could touch behind his ankles, and raise a leg to his belly. He explored his body like an infant, fascinated by the new mechanics, a rubber man doing a rubber man stretch.
Yes, I said, but if aging were so valuable, why do people always say, “Oh, if I were young again.” You never hear people say, “I wish I were sixty-five.” He smiled. “You know what that reflects? Unsatisfied lives. Unfulfilled lives. Lives that haven’t found meaning. Because if you’ve found meaning in your life, you don’t want to go back. You want to go forward. You want to see more, do more. You can’t wait until sixty-five.