Tuesdays with Morrie
by Mitch Albom
Post Author: Pepper Scott
I came to Tuesdays with Morrie by Mitch Albom the way many people do, already aware of its reputation, already braced for sentiment. What I found instead was something sturdier than sentiment. It was clarity.
Mitch Albom writes about his former professor Morrie Schwartz with the plain devotion of a student who finally understood, too late by his own account, what he had been taught all along. Morrie is dying of ALS when the book opens, and he continues dying, steadily and without self pity, across its pages. What makes the book remarkable is not the fact of his death but the manner of his living inside it. Morrie treats his final months as a curriculum, and Mitch, once his star pupil, becomes his student again, this time in a subject with no textbook.
This was the first book Terry and I ever read together on the subject of death and dying. Terry lived with MS, and he understood something about time that most people only learn secondhand. He used to say that death comes for everyone, sick or not, and that it cannot be outrun. What can be lost, he said, is life itself, if we spend it worrying about the ending instead of living the middle. He believed worry over death was worse than death. I agreed with him then. I agree with him still.
Reading Morrie's voice on the page, I kept hearing echoes of Terry's own philosophy. Neither man treated dying as a subject to tiptoe around. Both treated it as simply true, and therefore something to face with steadiness rather than dread. Morrie's insistence on staying present, on feeling grief or fear fully and then releasing it rather than living inside it, mirrors almost exactly how Terry moved through his own diagnosis. There is a comfort in finding your own life reflected back to you in someone else's words, even a stranger's, even one who has already died.
The book itself is spare. Albom does not reach for elaborate prose, and that restraint serves the material well. Morrie's aphorisms could have felt like greeting card wisdom in less careful hands. Instead they land with weight, because they are earned through the specific, unglamorous details of a man losing the use of his own body one function at a time, and choosing, again and again, to turn toward love rather than away from fear.
Terry thought the book was well written, with real insight and perspective, and he did not offer praise easily. That endorsement has always mattered more to me than any review I could write on my own.
If I have any criticism, it is a small one. The structure, built around Tuesday visits, occasionally repeats its own rhythms in ways a longer book might have varied. But that is a minor observation about a book whose purpose was never to dazzle stylistically. Its purpose was to teach, gently, the way Morrie himself taught, and in that it succeeds completely.
I recommend this book to anyone caring for someone they love, anyone grieving, and anyone who has simply grown too busy to notice their own life happening around them. Read it slowly. Then go call the people you love.
Read my personal reflection: Living Beyond Death
Affiliate link: Tuesdays with Morrie
