I know I cannot do this. None of us can undo what we’ve done, or relive a life already recorded. 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.
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.
Now it was gone. And as the strike continued – the first day, the second day, the third day – there were worried phone calls and rumors that this could go on for months. Everything I had known was upside down. There were sporting events each night that I would have gone to cover. Instead, I stayed home, watched them on TV. I had grown used to thinking readers somehow needed my column. I was stunned at how easily things went on without me.
He was invested in something else: giving himself away. At some point, during his dying, it became his immortality. Giving is living.
In all the time he was sick, Morrie never held out hope he would be cured. He was realistic to a fault. One time, I asked if someone were to wave a magic wand and make him all better, would he become, in time, the man he had been before? He shook his head. “No way I could go back. I am a different self now. I’m different in my attitudes.
I knew he was right. Not that I did anything about it.
I didn’t want to live anymore,” I whispered. “I know. I heard you.” “How? I never spoke.” “Despair has its own voice. It is a prayer unlike any other.
Man’s instinct is to find a way to live, but who wants to be the last to die?
I realise, two decades after the events of this book, that deep inside it was not dying that truly rattled Morrie. it was being forgotten.
People are slowly dying everywhere”, he said. “They are also continuously living. Every moment they draw breath. they can find the glory I put here on Earth, if they look for it.
Public taste is as fickle as a child’s attention span.
The less humans can solve a mystery, the more interesting it becomes.
But the human form is not permanent. It was never meant to be. That gift belongs to the soul.
Holding her hand was like a key turning a tumbler. My body melted. My breath calmed. As the minutes passed, I seemed to get smaller. The heavens grew enormous. When a spread of glowing stars.
When people leave this Earth, their loved ones always weep.” She smiled. “But I promise you, those who leave do not.
Beginnings and endings are earthly ideas. I go on. And because I go on, you go on with me. Feeling loss is part of why you are on Earth. Through it, you appreciate the brief gift of human existence, and you learn to cherish the world I created for you. But the human form is not permanent. It was never meant to be. That gift belongs to the soul.
Why would they want to?
Those moments are a gift.
But this orange raft and its hidden notebook? They were a jolt to that misery. He wasn’t sure why. Maybe it was the idea that something – even a few pages of something – had endured a tragedy and crossed an ocean to find him. It had survived. And witnessing survival can make us believe in our own.
And on this early page of man’s story, one different child can change the world.