Tuesdays with Don

The book is called “Tuesdays with Morrie.” Morrie had ALS, or Lou Gehrig’s disease, and Mitch Albom wrote a powerful story about his visits with Morrie on Tuesdays. It’s Tuesday, but I’m with Don.

Don has ALS too. That’s about where the similarity begins and ends.

Tuesday before Christmas Don has arranged a visit to the office staff. He wants to talk to us. Some say he wants to say goodbye and there’s a sense of finality to this visit. There’s a sniff of apprehension in the air.

The snow begins to fall heavily in the morning and by 11 o’clock it’s coming at a rate of an inch an hour. Still the staff gather to await Don’s arrival. His daughter Deb is driving him in from Lansing with four of her children. Other friends from the community show up, as well as retired staff who have shared life with Don for decades.

The weather delays the family’s arrival so we sing Christmas carols. Appropriate since Don’s granddaughters are coming to sing to us too. The van arrives on Angels We Have Heard on High, and Don rolls his wheelchair into the room as we finish O Come All Ye Faithful. One of the faithful has just come.

This is supposed to be about us sharing Don’s burden of impending death, isn’t it? Evidently not. Don reminds us that in his early life he was a counselor. He still is. Now he counsels the staff. He fills us in on how his ALS is progressing, what he can do, what he can’t do. How he’s learning to accept help. How the support group is pitching in. He bares his soul in his struggles, but with laughter and a twinkle that keeps us hovering between a smile and tears.

“I’m a man of action, and I’m learning to be still. I’m a man of crowds, and I am learning solitude. I’m a man of risk, and I am learning to be cautious. I’m asking God to keep me alive long enough to learn all the lessons I need to learn.”

At the end we gather around him, forty or fifty of us, hands on his shrunken shoulders. We pray over him and shoot some pictures. Maybe this will be the last time he comes in from Lansing, maybe not. But it’s Tuesday, and it’s Don’s day.

As he prepares to go back into the snow I watch his granddaughters help him with his coat, his hat, his gloves, and my mind races back a quarter century to my daughters doing the same thing for their own grandfather. Children learning to live with death. Children full of life giving their all to a man who is frail.

Yes, I need to spend another Tuesday with Don. There are more lessons to learn from the man who counsels his friends from a wheelchair.