Labor Day weekend is a great time every year. It feels more festive than any of the other three-day weekends throughout the calendar. Maybe it’s because it’s the unofficial end of summer (not a sad thing, just a thing; remember the old saying, “There are no vacations without work.”)

Also, Labor Day weekend still feels to me like the end of one year and the beginning of the next, because it still feels like the start of school. I’ve been out of school a long time (and I wasn’t even really in it that much when I was in it), but coming around this corner of the year always feel like the end of one lap and the beginning of another. (This is not because of the Jewish New Year, which starts next Wednesday night, as meaningful as that is in many other ways.)

It’s all about the echo of school. Of new pants and shoes, and loose-leaf binders, and pencil sharpeners in clear plastic colors (always looking for green), and making book covers out of grocery bags, and printing the names of the books in Magic Marker in big letters that get more and more crowded in as they get closer to the edge.

I had the best public schools at the best time in our history, safe places that had slow kids in with sharpies (and everyone learned just fine) and let boys run out their energy without medications, and even allowed fistfights to proceed (just so far) until the nearest teacher (man or woman, almost all women) would step in, separate the combatants and say something you’ll never hear again: “Okay, now shake hands and be friends.”

No expulsions, no law suits, no “Speed-dial the grief counselor!” No robotic administrators parroting regulations about zero-tolerance (which, of course, means zero help, zero comfort, zero justice and zero common sense).

I walked to school from Kindergarten through 12th and graduation. We had music and art and sports and an attendance officer who struck serious fear in the hearts of everyone just by walking down the hall and glowering, and male teachers in high school who took “disruptive” boys into the hall and, well, punched them (hard) in the arm — which, unless you’re stupid, is exactly what young boys want in the first place: to be rough-housed. (I was in that hall quite a bit, and always thought a wallop meant the teacher liked me.)

There was one day a year called “Dress Down Day” where everyone could wear jeans or shorts, but the rest of the time even the poorest kids had slacks and button-down shirts, and white shirts every Thursday, assembly day.

Ah, well: The Glory that was Rome.

So at least some of you must be wondering by now why I’m talking about Labor Day and arm-punching when today’s title is “Robert Schimmel,” a comedian who just died.

Robert was a friend; and I mean the real definition of friend, not some show-bizzy version where “my dearest, closest friend” means, “Although we haven’t actually met, the two of us could do business together if someone held guns to our heads.”

We like each other and respected each other, but the first is more important: We liked each other. And I suppose I intentionally started on something else, because there is so much loss in life to balance the gain. I guess we never really look at it each time it shows its face. But there is so much happiness available in life.

And Robert had so much loss in his, but he still had such a gleam of happiness in his eye; and I never knew how he did.

The guy gets Hepatitus C in the Air Force from a transfusion, has a heart attack, has his eleven-year-old son get cancer and die from it; gets a sitcom, films the pilot, gets it picked up (on the air), gets a whole network behind him, gets anointed as the next big thing… and then gets cancer himself. (That was the end of that TV show. He survived the cancer, but you know people: No one was going to want to anoint him with anything after chemo and radiation.)

Gets divorced (a messy one), gets remarried, works hard and reinvents himself — and then has a relapse.

Another divorce (even messier), goes to Arizona to help his sick father take care of his dying mother, who dies, stays to take care of his father (while his father took care of him), goes on the waiting list for a new liver…

And then this. A car accident. After all that, a car accident. His daughter was driving, and she’s stable, as they say, and he had another son in the car, too. Also eleven.

This one survived and seems a hundred percent.

Samuel Becket once wrote, “The tears of the world are a constant quantity. Where somewhere, someone starts crying, somewhere else someone stops.”

Here’s something you won’t read in any of the papers, and it’s really the whole point of this clog.

Robert’s parent were both Holocaust survivors. His father was marched out of their concentration camp with thousands of others as the Americans were advancing in the winter of ‘45, in order to… Oh, who knows what those horrible folks were even thinking at that point. They marched the prisoners, in no coats, until they died or dropped. And when they dropped, trying to catch a breath, they walked over and shot them — as calm as a glass of tea. Robert’s father dropped, along with his best friend, and a guard walked over and killed him. Otto, the father, was next to him, and he was the one shot, weakly holding up a hand and whispering, “No. Please.”

Then the guard turned to Otto and… Shot him? No. He screamed, “If you want to live, get up and keep going.” And somehow Otto did.

And a few years later, Robert was making people laugh in Las Vegas.

Here’s the thing, though. One night, Otto told Robery after a show, “You were good. You know, I always wanted to be a comic, but, well…” Can you imagine? Is life weird enough?

And here’s the deepest part: Otto never forgot that moment in the snow on that march. And one day Robert said to him something I still find extraordinary. Did you catch it? It was what the guard said.

If you put it in different hands, at a different moment, with a different feeling, Robert said, it’s actually the greatest, deepest, simplest advice in history:

“If you want to live, get up and keep going.”

Robert Schimmel certainly learned that lesson. Get up and keep going. He never gave up. He was a terrific comic, but maybe that was his greatest gift: Get up and keep going.

Not a bad lesson for all of us to learn. With all the things in his life, I told him once, even Job turned to God and said, “Gee, now I don’t feel so bad anymore.”

Have a great Labor Day weekend. And then, get up and keep going.

(P.S. If you feel like it, that new show of mine is available for free by subscribing to iTunes: “This Week With Larry Miller.)

REMEMBER: IF YOU WALKED OUT OF BED TODAY, AND NO ONE YOU LOVE GOT SICK AND DIED, AND NO ONE SHOT YOU WHEN YOU GOT TIRED… FOLKS, TURN ON A GAME AND CRACK A BEER, BECAUSE YOU ARE WALKING IN TALL COTTON.