Morrie Schwartz

Every other entry on this list can do something. They can mend, row, lamb, detect, carry. Morrie Schwartz, by the time Mitch Albom's book begins, is losing the ability to do anything at all. He is a retired sociology professor with ALS. The disease takes his dancing first, then his walking, then his hands. The philosophy needs to know what is left of a Wayfarer at that point, and Morrie is the answer.

What is left is Transmission. He cannot teach a class, so he teaches one student, on Tuesdays, from a chair and then from a bed. A former student who had not called in sixteen years turns up, and Morrie resumes the course as though it had only been adjourned. The subject is how to live, taught by a man who is visibly running out of it. He is a link in a chain and he knows exactly how much time he has to pass the thing on.

And Levity. He holds his own funeral while still alive, so that he can hear the nice things people say. He is frank about what he dreads, down to the day someone else will have to wipe him, and when the day comes he decides to enjoy being looked after like a child. None of it is put on as bravery. It is the refusal to grant suffering the size it asked for, practised at the hardest setting there is.

Mastery has gone, as far as the body is concerned. A cause in any active sense has gone. Motion, the floor, has become something other people do for him. Two pillars remain, and they turn out to be load-bearing. A life can stand on Transmission and Levity alone, for as long as it lasts.

Note also what the dog looks like at this stage. The external demand that does not consult your mood is a visitor arriving on Tuesday with a tape recorder and a bag of food. Morrie built that floor decades earlier, by being the kind of teacher a student would come back to.

The limit is the telling. This is Morrie as a grateful student wrote him, and a death with a good deal of company in it. Many people come to this stage with fewer visitors.