Living Beyond Death
Pepper Scott
I believe Tuesdays with Morrie was the first “death and dying” book Terry and I read together.
That sounds like a rather cheerful way to spend an afternoon, doesn't it?
But Terry was never particularly interested in doing things the usual way.
Most couples were probably discussing vacations, remodeling the kitchen, or whose turn it was to take out the trash. We were reading about death.
We were nothing if not well-rounded.
By then, Terry knew that MS was progressing and that he probably did not have a lot of time left. He also knew something that was much more important to him.
He was far more interested in living than dying.
Terry used to say, “Death will come for anyone, sick or not. It's unavoidable. Life, on the other hand, will slip away if we spend our time worrying about death. It's actually worse than death itself.”
He was right.
I still believe that. Actually, I believe it more now than I did when he first said it to me.
This book matters to me because it gave Terry and me something most couples never really get: a shared language for talking about something most people prefer to leave unnamed until there is no time left to talk about it gently.
We had time. Not really, but you know what I mean.
We could talk about death over coffee, which somehow made it seem a little less intimidating. There was something almost ordinary about it. We talked about Morrie and Mitch, what they were learning, and what it meant to live well when you knew the clock was not going to stop just because you had a few more things on your list.
Terry thought the book was well written and full of good insight and perspective. That was high praise coming from him. Terry did not hand out compliments like free samples at Costco. If he said a book had something true in it, I listened.
Before Tuesdays with Morrie, I think I held death at arm's length, the way most of us do. It was something to manage, preferably from a safe distance, rather than something to understand.
Morrie changed that for me.
Quietly.
He never seemed particularly interested in making dying dramatic. He simply talked about it. He noticed it. He allowed it to sit at the table with him, like an old acquaintance who had dropped by and might as well have a cup of coffee.
There was something comforting about that.
The book left me thinking less about the fear of losing time and more about the responsibility of using it.
That distinction has stayed with me.
So has Morrie's idea of detaching from painful emotions, not by avoiding them, but by allowing ourselves to fully feel them without letting them take over the whole house. That idea has stayed with me longer than almost any other single thought from a book I've read.
Perhaps because Terry already understood it.
He did not want to spend his remaining time rehearsing his own ending. He wanted to notice the weather, laugh at something ridiculous, read another book, drink his coffee, and be here.
He wanted to live.
And he did.
Even with MS sitting there in the background, making its presence known whether we invited it or not, Terry kept looking toward the next thing. The next book. The next cup of coffee. The next conversation. The next ordinary Tuesday.
That may be what I remember most.
We did not spend our time trying to make peace with death.
We spent it making room for life.
And maybe that is what Morrie gave us.
Not a lesson in how to die.
A reminder to pay attention while we're here.
Because none of us get to stay forever.
We just have different clocks.
Terry happened to know his was running faster.
So we read the book.
We talked about it.
And then, as usual, we got on with living.
