Tuesdays with Morrie

by Mitch Albom

funeral was held in lieu of graduation. Although no final exam was given, you were expected to produce one long paper on what was learned. That paper is presented here. The last class of my old professor’s life had only one student. I was the student.

seventies by this point, so they whispered “old age” and helped him to his feet. But Morrie, who was always more in touch with his insides than the rest of us, knew something else was wrong. This was more than old age. He was weary all the time. He had trouble sleeping. He dreamt he was dying.

Dream about dyinv

Morrie had amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), Lou Gehrig’s disease, a brutal, unforgiving illness of the neurological system.

the disease took him over, day by day, week by week. He backed the car out of the garage one morning and could barely push the brakes. That was the end of his driving. He kept tripping, so he purchased a cane. That was the end of his walking free.

So he hired his first home care worker—a theology student named Tony—who helped him in and out of the pool, and in and out of his bathing suit. In the locker room, the other swimmers pretended not to stare. They stared anyhow. That was the end of his privacy.

“My friends, I assume you are all here for the Social Psychology class. I have been teaching this course for twenty years, and this is the first time I can say there is a risk in taking it, because I have a fatal illness. I may not live to finish the semester. “If you feel this is a problem, I understand if you wish to drop the course.” He smiled.

ALS is like a lit candle: it melts your nerves and leaves your body a pile of wax. Often, it begins with the legs and works its way up. You lose control of your thigh muscles, so that you cannot support yourself standing. You lose control of your trunk muscles, so that you cannot sit up straight. By the end, if you are still alive, you are breathing through a tube in a hole in your throat, while your soul, perfectly awake, is imprisoned inside a limp husk, perhaps able to blink, or cluck a tongue, like something from a science fiction movie, the man frozen inside his own flesh. This takes no more than five years from the day you contract the disease.

Study me in my slow and patient demise. Watch what happens to me. Learn with me.

Morrie would walk that final bridge between life and death, and narrate the trip.

One day, using his cane, he stepped onto the curb and fell over into the street. The cane was exchanged for a walker. As his body weakened, the back and forth to the bathroom became too exhausting, so Morrie began to urinate into a large beaker. He had to support himself as he did this, meaning someone had to hold the beaker while Morrie filled it.

“Listen, I have to pee. Would you mind helping? Are you okay with that?” Often, to their own surprise, they were.

He told his friends that if they really wanted to help him, they would treat him not with sympathy but with visits, phone calls, a sharing of their problems—the way they had always shared their problems, because Morrie had always been a wonderful listener.

“living funeral.”

buried myself in accomplishments, because with accomplishments, I believed I could control things, I could squeeze in every last piece of happiness before I got sick and died, like my uncle before me, which I figured was my natural fate.

His legs were dead; he would never walk again.

Yet he refused to be depressed. Instead, Morrie had become a lightning rod of ideas. He jotted down his thoughts on yellow pads, envelopes, folders, scrap paper. He wrote bite-sized philosophies about living with death’s shadow: “Accept what you are able to do and what you are not able to do”; “Accept the past as past, without denying it or discarding it”; “Learn to forgive yourself and to forgive others”; “Don’t assume that it’s too late to get involved.”

“Well, the two times you saw my show, what did you think?” Morrie paused. “To be honest?” “Yes?” “I thought you were a narcissist.”

“I’m too ugly to be a narcissist,”

His philosophy was that death should not be embarrassing; he was not about to powder its nose.

I going to withdraw from the world, like most people do, or am I going to live?’ I decided I’m going to live—or at least try to live—the way I want, with dignity, with courage, with humor, with composure. “There are some mornings when I cry and cry and mourn for myself. Some mornings, I’m so angry and bitter. But it doesn’t last too long. Then I get up and say, ‘I want to live…’ “So far, I’ve been able to do it. Will I be able to continue? I don’t know. But I’m betting on myself that I will.”

Maybe I shouldn’t take it. “Mitchell?” Morrie says, reading from the attendance list. I raise a hand. “Do you prefer Mitch? Or is Mitchell better?” I have never been asked this by a teacher. I do a double take at this guy in his yellow turtleneck and green corduroy pants, the silver hair that falls on his forehead. He is smiling. Mitch, I say. Mitch is what my friends called me. “Well, Mitch it is then,” Morrie says, as if closing a deal. “And, Mitch?” Yes? “I hope that one day you will think of me as your friend.”

“My old friend,” he whispered, “you’ve come back at last.” He rocked against me, not letting go, his hands reaching up for my elbows as I bent over him. I was surprised at such affection after all these years, but then, in the stone walls I had built between my present and my past, I had forgotten how close we once were. I remembered graduation day, the briefcase, his tears at my departure, and I swallowed because I knew, deep down, that I was no longer the good, gift-bearing student he remembered.

“Have you found someone to share your heart with?” he asked. “Are you giving to your community? “Are you at peace with yourself? “Are you trying to be as human as you can be?”

“Dying,” Morrie suddenly said, “is only one thing to be sad over, Mitch. Living unhappily is something else. So many of the people who come to visit me are unhappy.” Why? “Well, for one thing,

the culture we have does not make people feel good about themselves. We’re teaching the wrong things. And you have to be strong enough to say if the culture doesn’t work, don’t buy it. Create your own. Most people can’t do it. They’re more unhappy

“Which side wins?” He smiles at me, the crinkled eyes, the crooked teeth. “Love wins. Love always wins.”

“So many people walk around with a meaningless life. They seem half-asleep, even when they’re busy doing things they think are important. This is because they’re chasing the wrong things. The way you get meaning into your life is to devote yourself to loving others, devote yourself to your community around you, and devote yourself to creating something that gives you purpose and meaning.”

“A lot of sharks.” That’s what I hear. “Still,” he says, “if you really want it, then you’ll make your dream happen.”

“Because it’s the ultimate sign of dependency. Someone wiping your bottom. But I’m working on it. I’m trying to enjoy the process.”

“Yes. After all, I get to be a baby one more time.”

But I can sit here with my dwindling days and look at what I think is important in life. I have both the time—and the reason—to do that.” So, I said, in a reflexively cynical response, I guess the key to finding the meaning of life is to stop taking out the garbage?

“Ah, Mitch, I’m gonna loosen you up. One day, I’m gonna show you it’s okay to cry.”

“The most important thing in life is to learn how to give out love, and to let it come in.” His voice dropped to a whisper. “Let it come in. We think we don’t deserve love, we think if we let it in we’ll become too soft. But a wise man named Levine said it right. He said, ‘Love is the only rational act.’ ” He repeated it carefully, pausing for effect. “ ‘Love is the only rational act.’ ” I nodded, like a good student, and he exhaled weakly. I leaned over to give him a hug. And then, although it is not really like me, I kissed him on the cheek. I felt his weakened hands on my arms, the thin stubble of his whiskers brushing my face. “So you’ll come back next Tuesday?” he whispered.

“Sometimes, in the mornings,” he said. “That’s when I mourn. I feel around my body, I move my fingers and my hands—whatever I can still move—and I mourn what I’ve lost. I mourn the slow, insidious way in which I’m dying. But then I stop mourning.”

“I give myself a good cry if I need it. But then I concentrate on all the good things still in my life. On the people who are coming to see me. On the stories I’m going to hear. On you—if it’s Tuesday. Because we’re Tuesday people.”

Morrie’s armpits, and hooked him toward me, as if lifting a large log from underneath. Then I straightened up, hoisting him as I rose. Normally, when you lift someone, you expect their arms to tighten around your grip, but Morrie could not do this. He was mostly dead weight, and I felt his head bounce softly on my shoulder and his body sag against me like a big damp loaf.

Did he lament lost friends? Would he have done much differently? Selfishly, I wondered if I were in his shoes, would I be consumed with sad thoughts of all that I had missed? Would I regret the secrets I had kept hidden?

“It’s what everyone worries about, isn’t it? What if today were my last day on earth?”

“Mitch,” he said, “the culture doesn’t encourage you to think about such things until you’re about to die. We’re so wrapped up with egotistical things, career, family, having enough money, meeting the mortgage, getting a

I made a small list on a yellow legal pad, issues and questions that we all grapple with, from happiness to aging to having children to death.

Do you take care of others or take care of your “inner child”? Return to traditional values or reject tradition as useless? Seek success or seek simplicity? Just Say No or Just Do It?

I wanted that clarity. Every confused and tortured soul I knew wanted that clarity.

I snicker, but the idea is momentarily appealing. Part of me is scared of leaving school. Part of me wants to go desperately. Tension of opposites. I watch Morrie as he reads my thesis, and wonder what the big world will be like out there.

“You look fine,” Koppel said when the tape began to roll. “That’s what everybody tells me,” Morrie said. “You sound fine.” “That’s what everybody tells me.” “So how do you know things are going downhill?” Morrie sighed. “Nobody can know it but me, Ted. But I know it.” And as he

He was not waving his hands to make a point as freely as he had in their first conversation. He had trouble pronouncing certain words—the l sound seemed to get caught in his throat. In a few more months, he might no longer speak at all.

‘I lost my mother when I was a child…and it was quite a blow to me…I wish I’d had a group like yours where I would have been able to talk about my sorrows. I would have joined your group because…’ ” His voice cracked. “ ‘…because I was so lonely…’ ”

“Morrie,” Koppel said, “that was seventy years ago your mother died. The pain still goes on?” “You bet,” Morrie whispered.

One of his aunts, a heavyset woman, grabbed Morrie and began to wail: “What will you do without your mother? What will become of you?”

Morrie watched as they shoveled dirt into his mother’s grave. He tried to recall the tender moments they had shared when she was alive. She had operated a candy store until she got sick, after which she mostly slept or sat by the window, looking frail and weak. Sometimes she would yell out for her son to get her some medicine, and young Morrie, playing stickball in the street, would pretend he did not hear her. In his mind he believed he could make the illness go away by ignoring it.

How else can a child confront death?