Untitled Document

Morrie Schwartz Interview - Part 2

Transcript - NIGHTLINE with TED KOPPEL

07/14/98

ANNOUNCER: July 15, 1998.

MORRIE: Maybe the distance between life and death isn't as great as

you think.

TED KOPPEL, ABC News: (voice-over) He was a dying man who charmed us

with his lively spirit.

MORRIE: I think I'm less humble now than I was before.

TED KOPPEL: Really?

MORRIE: Believe it or not.

TED KOPPEL: (voice-over) He shared his fears openly.

MORRIE: Is it a horrible death? Are you choking or, for how long?

TED KOPPEL: (voice-over) And he shared his many lessons.

MORRIE: Don't let go too soon but don't hang on too long. Find your

balance.

TED KOPPEL: (voice-over) Tonight, more conversations with Morrie,

lessons on living.

ANNOUNCER: From ABC News, this is Nightline. Reporting from

Washington, Ted Koppel.

TED KOPPEL: Some of you met Morrie for the first time three years ago

when he agreed to let me visit him at his home outside Boston to talk

about life and death. Both were very much on his mind because Morrie

was dying of ALS, Lou Gehrig's Disease, it is one of nature's

particularly nasty aberrations in that it destroys all the synapses in

a victim's body so that gradually you lose the ability to use any of

your muscles. It doesn't affect the mind, just the body. You still

think clearly and until nearly the end, you can still talk.

Morrie agreed to talk to me about dying while it was happening to him.

It is, after all, the one experience we will all have in common. But

most of us are either unable or unwilling to talk about it, especially

on national TV. But Morrie was an unusual man, as some of you may have

learned from reading a current best seller called Tuesdays With Morrie,

which was written by his friend and former student Mitch Albom. The

book has become so popular and so many of you contacted us and said that

you'd love to hear from Morrie again that we decided to rerun some of

our conversations, which we began doing last night. If all of that

sounds terribly depressing, it's not, because Morrie was such a sweet

and joyful man. We were actually waiting to do our second interview

with Morrie when he called me. He was starting to worry about how much

longer he'd be able to speak. He'd received a lot of good reaction to

our first program two months earlier and frankly I think he was just

eager to do another one.

(interviewing) You look fine.

MORRIE: That's what everybody tells me.

TED KOPPEL: You sound fine.

MORRIE: That's what everybody tells me.

TED KOPPEL: So how do you know that things are going downhill?

MORRIE: Nobody can know it but i. I know it one, that my swallowing

is more difficult now. I cough a lot. I sometimes have to chew my food

very, very finely to get it down and I don't know how long that'll last,

but that's the first big thing. The second big thing is that my voice

is somewhat slurred. You may not hear it but when I make the owl sounds

it gets into the throat rather than out there, slurred. That's also the

beginning signs of losing your voice, losing my voice and I figured Ted,

if you're going to come back when I don't have a voice, it's not going

to do you much good.

TED KOPPEL: What about your hands, Morrie? We had that delicate

standard that you and I set, the ass wiping standard.

MORRIE: I'm still doing it.

TED KOPPEL: Well, I'm happy to hear that.

MORRIE: Thank you.

TED KOPPEL: After you were on Nightline the last time you got some

reaction.

MORRIE: I sure did.

TED KOPPEL: Tell me about it.

MORRIE: Well, there were lots of letters, this is from a teacher in a

small Pennsylvania town called Pociamen Valley Middle School. (ph) And

she has four girls and five boys 10 to 13 years of age. Each of these

kids lost a parent and she's trying to get them to talk about it in a

group. And the kids, especially the boys, are having a very hard time

talking about it. And this is what I said. "Dear Barbara Conaut," (ph)

that's the teacher, "I was moved by your letter," this is me writing,

"and feel that the work you are doing with the children who have lost a

parent is very important. I also lost a parent at an early age. I lost

my mother," and you see I still can cry about it, "at age eight. And it

was quite a blow to me. I wish I had had a group like yours where I

would have been able to talk about my sorrows and share even though it

might have been hard, to talk about my feelings. I would have enjoyed

your group because I was so lonely. Right now I find I can't live alone

either. But I have my friends around me to keep me, to help me talk

about my illness. I send each of you and all of you as a group my warm

thoughts and hope for your continued work together to help each other.

As I talk with my friends, I will think of you talking with yours.

Warmly, Morrie."

TED KOPPEL: Morrie, that was 70 years ago that your mother died and it

still chokes you up. You are so brave and cheerful about your own

condition now and I just wonder why it is that something that happened

so long ago is so much more painful to you?

MORRIE: That has nothing to do with bravery. It all has to do with

feeling. I don't feel any less powerful just because I've cried about

my mother's death. As a matter of fact, tears for me strengthen me.

They don't weaken me. When I cry I cry about a lot of things all at once

and it includes my own demise. And sometimes, believe it or not, I cry

for the pain of the world. Not often enough, I'm afraid, because

there's a hell of a lot of pain in this world.

TED KOPPEL: For Morrie, even the simplest tasks were becoming a

struggle. Part two, in a moment.

(Commercial Break)

TED KOPPEL: Four months would pass before Morrie and I would meet for

what would be our final on camera conversation. By then, Morrie had

become a friend of mine and it was no longer the objective business it

had been when I first flew up to Boston six months earlier. So, when

Morrie told me that he wasn't sure about recording a final

conversation, that he'd been having some choking episodes and that he

really didn't want the camera rolling on such an undignified scene, it

didn't seem right to try to persuade him. I said I'd call him back for

his final decision. The next day he said he wanted to go ahead.

(interviewing) It is a sensational day outside. Does any of that

have any impact on your life any more, what it's like outside?

MORRIE: Only what I can see through my windows. I cannot get out. I

move between this chair and my bed mostly. So, the world outside is an

imagined world and sensed only in these narrow confines.

TED KOPPEL: You had some doubts the other day when I called you up

about whether we should do what will probably be our last session

together.

MORRIE: Right.

TED KOPPEL: Why did you have doubts?

MORRIE: When you called, Ted, and this has happened every day the last

month or two, I was terribly fatigued, hardly any energy at all and in

addition I had had a number of coughing spells in which the phlegm

resided in my chest and I couldn't get it out. And I said to myself I

don't want to be photographed as a spectacle.

TED KOPPEL: But if all that we see of Morrie's dying is this very

dignified old man with a wonderful sense of humor and who has always had

this little sparkle in his eye and who was always able to, you know,

very, put a very gentle, a very gentle spin on things, if that is all we

see, we're not showing the whole process.

MORRIE: It's a deception if that's all you see and I'm not into

deception.

TED KOPPEL: All right, then at least...

MORRIE: You're going to see it all.

TED KOPPEL: All right. In words, then, take us into it. You're more

afraid now than you were a few months ago.

MORRIE: No.

TED KOPPEL: No?

MORRIE: Less afraid.

TED KOPPEL: Really?

MORRIE: Yup. I'm less afraid but I'm still afraid because I've been

working on my fear. I am more concerned about going out in a way that

is serene and composed. I'm more afraid of not going out that way. I'm

not so afraid of the death, I'm afraid of the suffering that it might

entail. And I've heard of an aphorism, don't let go too soon, but don't

hang on too long. Find your balance.

TED KOPPEL: Morrie, you don't have to do this if you don't want to.

I'll help you put your glasses on. But I think a fairly simple way of

demonstrating to people what the nature of this disease is is if you

would just show us. Try to put your glasses on.

MORRIE: I'll be happy to do that.

TED KOPPEL: OK. All right.

MORRIE: I can't do it.

TED KOPPEL: You can't do it.

MORRIE: Oh, thank you.

TED KOPPEL: By inference, then, I have to conclude that what I rather

crudely set out the first time you and I met, the old ass wipe test, you

can't do that any more, right? You can't...

MORRIE: I am being fed now. I cannot feed myself...

TED KOPPEL: You can't feed yourself...

MORRIE: -- at all. Any meal.

TED KOPPEL: And when you have to go to the bathroom you need

someone...

MORRIE: Puts me on the commode. That's how far it's gotten.

TED KOPPEL: How difficult has it been to adjust to that?

MORRIE: I have no shame because that's a cultural phenomenon that

we've had built into us. My dignity comes from my inner self and the

fact that I can keep myself composed and humorous if necessary and fully

human all the time.

TED KOPPEL: It is our occasional practice on this program to close

with some final thoughts. Morrie's final thoughts from our last

interview, when we come back.

(Commercial Break)

TED KOPPEL: I don't want to sop up all the energy you've got left,

Morrie, but you tell me, as we come to the end of this particular phase

of the journey, if there's anything left that you want to say to several

million people who have now, you know, come to regard you as, in some

small way, a part of their own lives?

MORRIE: The basic statement really is twofold, as far as I'm

concerned, and we all learn it too late, to be compassionate with

yourself and with each other and to be loving with yourself, towards

yourself and with others and to take responsibility for yourself and for

others. If we learned that lesson, this world would be so much better a

place and we would be so much better human beings. Compassion, love,

awareness and responsibility for and to each other, that's the lesson

I've learned.

TED KOPPEL: Why do you think it's so hard for people to learn that

when they're in the full bloom of youth and vigor and have all their

strength?

MORRIE: Ego, ego, ego. Vanity, vanity, always vanity. We're too full

of ego. Now it has its positive aspects, of course. That's what makes

you do things. But on the other hand, that's what makes you destroy

things, too. I am stronger, I will prevail, I will be powerful even if

it means killing you. We haven't evolved enough to have gotten to a

place that we understand this. So we keep on mutilating each other.

Does that touch you somewhere?

TED KOPPEL: Sure.

MORRIE: OK. So those are what I would say. And the last thing about

death itself, I'm still saying the same thing, it's all a mystery. But

I do believe there has to be something beyond this material world. It

is not sufficient given everything else that's happening. But what it

is, I don't know. I promised everybody if I can, I'll let them know.

I'll tell them all.

TED KOPPEL: I was just thinking, Morrie, that so often on this program

I say to people any last thoughts. It has a whole different meaning

when I say it to you.

MORRIE: That's right. Any last thoughts. Well, I appreciate the fact

that I can get my message across and you would facilitate it and I would

just repeat what all you said the last time that one of us spoke or

maybe that --yeah, love each other or die. That is it. That's my

last thought.

TED KOPPEL: Enough, Morrie.

MORRIE: Ganuk. (ph)

TED KOPPEL: Ganuk.

MORRIE: Do you think we did what you wanted us to?

TED KOPPEL: I think so.

MORRIE: I gave you what I had.

TED KOPPEL: You always do.

MORRIE: To the very end. The disease is not going to get my spirit.

TED KOPPEL: No.

MORRIE: It can get my body but it will not get my spirit.

TED KOPPEL: You've done good, Morrie.

MORRIE: I'll bargain with him up there. Having done a good life, do I

get to be one of the angels?

TED KOPPEL: You'd be cute with a pair of wings, Morrie.

In a moment, the writer and former student who spent Tuesdays with

Morrie.

(Commercial Break)

TED KOPPEL: And joining us once again, best selling author Mitch

Albom. His book, Tuesdays With Morrie, chronicles his reacquaintance

with the sociology professor he rediscovered when he saw him on

Nightline.

He made it very easy to drop masks, didn't he? I mean you didn't feel

the need to maintain any of those postures that we keep up in regular

life?

MITCH ALBOM, Author, "Tuesdays With Morrie":He was like that before he

ever got sick, too.

TED KOPPEL: That's what I wanted to ask you about.

MITCH ALBOM: He was like that as a teacher, too. It wasn't just all

of a sudden he's dying, he had a revelation and he became a different

person. All the things that were important to him in his death had been

important to him in his life and I think that's a tribute to him.

TED KOPPEL: But, you see, I never saw that side of him. So tell me

about what it was that caused, I mean Morrie, in his last months,

clearly was very vulnerable and he never, simply by virtue of his size,

could have been much of a threatening figure.

MITCH ALBOM: Yeah, well he had the great ability to listen, Ted, and

as a teacher I don't think there's anything better you could have. He

made every student he had feel like they were the most important and

first student he'd ever had. And it's funny, after Tuesdays With Morrie

came out, I had a lot of people come up to me who had had Morrie as a

teacher and say, I thought I was his favorite student. He just had that

ability to make you feel like I'm listening to you now, I'm present with

you now and it was accelerated and amplified by his death.

TED KOPPEL: I should point out that all the money you've made off the

book is going either to the family or to his beloved university.

MITCH ALBOM: Well we, I only did it, I only wrote the book to help pay

his medical bills. We had no idea so many people would come to it and

wherever Morrie is now he's getting a big kick out of how large this

classroom has grown.

TED KOPPEL: And I should say, I think what would probably please him

most, as you said, there are actually going to be, what, are you going

to have a scholarship or?

MITCH ALBOM: Well, we're looking into setting up something like that

so that the teaching can go on. He was, after all, a teacher. That's

what he wanted on his tombstone, a teacher to the last.

TED KOPPEL: And if you were to synthesize Morrie's message in a line

or two it would be what?

MITCH ALBOM: Death ends a life but not a relationship. He said it

over and over again and that relationship that I had with him, that his

family had with him, that you had with him has apparently gone on and

apparently with a lot of other people as well. And it's not just about

Morrie, it's about everyone who has a loved one in their life. That

doesn't have to end the relationship if the relationship was good.

TED KOPPEL: Mitch, thanks very much.

MITCH ALBOM: Oh, it's my pleasure.

TED KOPPEL: And Morrie, you're in reruns.

That's our report for tonight. I'm Ted Koppel in Washington. For all

of us here at ABC News in Washington, good night.

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