"I cry all the time now," he said. "Never mind."
Amazing, I thought. I worked in the news business. I covered stories
where people died. I interviewed grieving family members. I even
attended the funerals. I never cried. Morrie, for the suffering of
people half a world away, was weeping. Is this what comes at the
end, I wondered? Maybe death is the great equalizer, the one big
thing that can finally make strangers shed a tear for one another.
Morrie honked loudly into the tissue. "This is okay with you, isn't
it? Men crying?"
Sure, I said, too quickly.
He grinned. "Ah, Mitch, I'm gonna loosen you up. One day, I'm gonna
show you it's okay to cry."
Yeah, yeah, I said. "Yeah, yeah," he said.
We laughed because he used to say the same thing nearly twenty years
earlier. Mostly on Tuesdays. In fact, Tuesday had always been our
day together. Most of my courses with Morrie were on Tuesdays, he
had office hours on Tuesdays, and when I wrote my senior thesis
which was pretty much Morrie's suggestion, right from the start-it
was on Tuesdays that we sat together, by his desk, or in the
cafeteria, or on the steps of Pearlman Hall,going over the work.
So it seemed only fitting that we were back together on a Tuesday,
here in the house with the Japanese maple out front. As I readied to
go, I mentioned this to Morrie.
"We're Tuesday people," he said. Tuesday people, I repeated.
Morrie smiled.
"Mitch, you asked about caring for people I don't even know. But can
I tell you the thing I'm learning most with this disease?"
What's that?
"The most important thing in life is to learn how to give out love,
and to let it come in."
His voice dropped to a whisper. "Let it come in. We think we don't
deserve love, we think if we let it in we'll become too soft. But a
wise man named Levine said it right. He said, `Love is the only
rational act.' "
He repeated it carefully, pausing for effect. "
`Love is the only rational act.' "
I nodded, like a good student, and he exhaled weakly. I leaned over
to give him a hug. And then, although it is not really like me, I
kissed him on the cheek. I felt his weakened hands on my arms, the
thin stubble of his whiskers brushing my face.
"So you'll come back next Tuesday?" he whispered.
He enters the classroom, sits down, doesn't say anything. He looks
at its, we look at him. At first, there are a few giggles, but
Morrie only shrugs, and eventually a deep silence falls and we begin
to notice the smallest sounds, the radiator humming in the corner of
the room, the nasal breathing of one of the fat students.
Some of us are agitated. When is lie going to say something? We
squirm, check our watches. A few students look out the window,
trying to be above it all. This goes on a good fifteen minutes,
before Morrie finally breaks in with a whisper.
"What's happening here?" he asks.
And slowly a discussion begins as Morrie has wanted all along-about
the effect of silence on human relations. My are we embarrassed by
silence? What comfort do we find in all the noise?
I am not bothered by the silence. For all the noise I make with my
friends, I am still not comfortable talking about my feelings in
front ofothers especially not classmates. I could sit in the quiet
for hours if that is what the class demanded.
