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.
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.