4 Love Lessons from Mister Rogers' Neighborhood

How many of you have seen the new Tom Hanks movie, A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood, the one where he plays children’s TV host, Mr. Rogers?

OK, I see some hands. What did you think?

My wife and I went to see the movie recently, and I came away convinced it had something important to say … if I could only figure out what it was.

Minor spoiler alert: If you haven’t seen It’s a Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood, what follows might be a bit of a spoiler, although I don’t think it’s a big one.

One scene, in particular, kept coming back to me. Near the end of the movie, Mr. Rogers, played by Tom Hanks, is sitting with a family he knows. One of the family members is confined to a sickbed. We’re told this person is close to death.

At one point, the dying man says something about the fact that he probably won’t be around much longer. Everyone falls into an uncomfortable silence. Except for Rogers, who launches into a little monologue about death. It’s very surreal.

“To die,” Rogers says, “is a very human thing. Anything that’s human deserves to be mentioned. And anything that can be mentioned . . . can be managed.”

At least that’s what I think he said. I might have been a bit distracted because of the tears in my eyes.

What was Mr. Rogers' Secret?

The scene wasn’t sorrowful, really. It was about family togetherness more than about death. So what was this emotion that made me react so strongly?

I thought and thought about it all today. Finally, I realized the answer:

It was love.

Watching the movie, I had a sense of how it must have felt to be in Mr. Rogers’ company. And to feel loved by him. It was overwhelming.

This strange man napped every afternoon, never seemed to be in a hurry, and wore the same clothes on TV for 30-plus years. According to an article in Esquire magazine, from which the movie is adapted, he weighed himself every morning to make sure he still weighed 143 pounds, because if you count the number of letters in the words, 143 means “I love you.” This man wasn’t afraid to love. Even if that meant risking being laughed at. Or sounding weird, giving a lecture about death to a family that isn’t really interested in hearing what he has to say—until they feel the love in his voice.

... every morning, when he swims, he steps on a scale in his bathing suit and his bathing cap and his goggles, and the scale tells him that he weighs 143 pounds. This has happened so many times that Mister Rogers has come to see that number as a gift...

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