Tuesdays with Morrie

by Mitch Albom

When she finished, Morrie opened his eyes and tears rolled down his cheeks. In all the years I have listened to my wife sing, I never heard her the way he did at that moment.

I knew how much he respected her, because sometimes when we spoke, he would say, “Charlotte might be uncomfortable with me revealing that,” and he would end the conversation. It was the only time Morrie held anything back.

He ended the subject by quoting the poem he believed in like a prayer: “Love each other or perish.”

“What’s the question?” he says. Remember the Book of Job? “From the Bible?” Right. Job is a good man, but God makes him suffer. To test his faith. “I remember.” Takes away everything he has, his house, his money, his family… “His health.” Makes him sick. “To test his faith.” Right. To test his faith. So, I’m wondering… “What are you wondering?” What you think about that? Morrie coughs violently. His hands quiver as he drops them by his side. “I think,” he says, smiling, “God overdid it.”

Morrie believed in the inherent good of people. But he also saw what they could become. “People are only mean when they’re threatened,” he said later that day, “and that’s what our culture does. That’s what our economy does. Even people who have jobs in our economy are threatened, because they worry about losing them. And when you get threatened, you start looking out only for yourself. You start making money a god. It is all part of this culture.” He exhaled. “Which is why I don’t buy into it.”

“Take my condition. The things I am supposed to be embarrassed about now—not being able to walk, not being able to wipe my ass, waking up some mornings wanting to cry—there is nothing innately embarrassing or shaming about them.

“Look, no matter where you live, the biggest defect we human beings have is our shortsightedness. We don’t see what we could be. We should be looking at our potential, stretching ourselves into everything we can become. But if you’re surrounded by people who say ‘I want mine now,’ you end up with a few people with everything and a military to keep the poor ones from rising up and stealing it.”

“But believe me, when you are dying, you see it is true. We all have the same beginning—birth—and we all have the same end—death. So how different can we be?

“In the beginning of life, when we are infants, we need others to survive, right? And at the end of life, when you get like me, you need others to survive, right?” His voice dropped to a whisper. “But here’s the secret: in between, we need others as well.”

At one point, in the midst of “We’re number one!” he rises and yells, “What’s wrong with being number two?” The students look at him. They stop chanting. He sits down, smiling and triumphant.

“Look at me,” he says. I’m looking. “You’ll come to my grave? To tell me your problems?” My problems? “Yes.” And you’ll give me answers? “I’ll give you what I can. Don’t I always?”

“It’s natural to die,” he said again. “The fact that we make such a big hullabaloo over it is all because we don’t see ourselves as part of nature. We think because we’re human we’re something above nature.”

“As long as we can love each other, and remember the feeling of love we had, we can die without ever really going away. All the love you created is still there. All the memories are still there. You live on—in the hearts of everyone you have touched and nurtured while you were here.”

His voice was raspy, which usually meant he needed to stop for a while. I placed the plant back on the ledge and went to shut off the tape recorder. This is the last sentence Morrie got out before I did: “Death ends a life, not a relationship.”

The title, by the way, we came up with one day in Morrie’s office. He liked naming things. He had several ideas. But when I said, “How about Tuesdays with Morrie?” he smiled in an almost blushing way, and I knew that was it.