Tuesday’s with Morrie: An Old Man, A Young Man, and Life’s Greatest Lesson

“He had always been a dancer, my old professor. The music didn’t matter. Rock and roll, big band, the blues. He loved them all. He would close his eyes and with a blissful smile begin to move to his own sense of rhythm. It wasn’t always pretty. But then, he didn’t worry about a partner. Morrie danced by himself.” 

Morrie has a great love for life and for the things that really matter: affection, laughter, conversation, sunlight, flowers, music, dance. He knows that these things, not money or power, are what make life worth living. 

“Do I wither up and disappear, or do I make the best of my time left? he had asked himself. He would not wither. He would not be ashamed of dying. Instead, he would make death his final project, the center point of his days. Since everyone was going to die, he could be of great value, right? He could be research. A human textbook. 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.”

A lifelong student of the mental states of humans, Morrie decides to make an informal study of his death that will be available to others. He invites people for talks and informal seminars, and he even holds his own “living funeral” so friends and family can say goodbye. These final efforts appear on the TV news show Nightline and Albom records them for posterity in his book.

“I 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.” 

Determined not to repeat his uncle’s mistake of hating work and then dying early, Albom becomes a hard-charging, workaholic sports journalist who climbs quickly. He marries Janine and promises to raise a family with her, but he’s always too busy for that. In his eagerness to chase after happiness, he gives up many values that mattered to him in his youth. His conversations with his old college professor Morrie help him to reconnect to those values. 

“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.’” 

As his body deteriorates, Morrie’s mind goes into overdrive, and he collects aphorisms (more than 50 in all) while pondering his imminent death. A professor friend shares them with a major Boston newspaper; this leads to Ted Koppel’s interview with Morrie on TV news show Nightline. Albom sees the interview and contacts Morrie. 

“‘People see me as a bridge. I’m not as alive as I used to be, but I’m not yet dead. I’m sort of … in-between.’ He coughed, then regained his smile. ‘I’m on the last great journey here—and people want me to tell them what to pack.’” 

Morrie understands that people don’t know much about death, and they want to know how to behave as it approaches. They’re hoping he knows how to ease the transition when the feared day approaches. He knows much more than that, and he shares his insights on how death can teach us to live more meaningful lives.  

“The culture we have does not make people feel good about themselves. And you have to be strong enough to say if the culture doesn’t work, don’t buy it.” 

Morrie warns that the modern world offers mere distractions, and its incentives and pressures funnel people into lives of sensation and empty thrills rather than fulfillment and satisfaction. Though the culture seems an overwhelming force, Morrie declares that people can walk away from that force and create a culture of their own that nourishes meaning and satisfaction. 

“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.” 

Morrie has long since taken his own advice and created a unique culture for himself that involves long conversations, reading, walks in nature, free-form dancing, and affectionate friendships. During his final illness, he keeps up as much of these activities as he can. Albom, by contrast, can only cite as his personal culture an obsession with work. 

“I thought about all the people I knew who spent many of their waking hours feeling sorry for themselves. How useful it would be to put a daily limit on self-pity. Just a few tearful minutes, then on with the day.”

Albom notices that the one person most entitled to self-pity, Morrie, sets an example by permitting himself only a small amount of it each morning and spending the rest of the day enjoying the company of others.

“I had this vision of me keeling over at my desk one day, halfway through a story, my editors snatching the copy even as the medics carried my body away.” 

Albom fears he’s pursuing the wrong life quests, and that, were he to discover he was about to die, he might regret his choices. Perhaps all his acquaintances want from him is work product. There must be a better way.

“We’re so wrapped up with egotistical things, career, family, having enough money, meeting the mortgage, getting a new car, fixing the radiator when it breaks—we’re involved in trillions of little acts just to keep going. So we don’t get into the habit of standing back and looking at our lives and saying, Is this all? Is this all I want? Is something missing?” 

Morrie describes what Albom fears, a life of busy-ness instead of a life of compassion and dedication. Sometimes it takes an outsider, perhaps a teacher, to shake up our patterns and point out the mindless parts of our lives. 

“‘Everyone knows they’re going to die,’ he said again, ‘but nobody believes it. If we did, we would do things differently.’ So we kid ourselves about death, I said. ‘Yes. But there’s a better approach. To know you’re going to die, and to be prepared for it at any time. That’s better. That way you can actually be more involved in your life while you’re living.’”

We waste much of our lives doing silly or pointless things while we put off confronting the final problem that every person must face: death. Knowing our time has limits, we can make better use of it. Our mortality points the way to our biggest task, creating purpose and meaning. 

“Once you learn how to die, you learn how to live.” 

Charlie freely admits that, until his terminal diagnosis, he ignored death like everyone else. He now focuses on small things, like the view of nature through his window, appreciating them much more than most people. 

“If you don’t have the support and love and caring and concern that you get from a family, you don’t have much at all. Love is so supremely important. As our great poet Auden said, ‘Love each other or perish.’” 

For Morrie, family is vital. Friends are wonderful, but family keeps watch. His family is warm, loving, and affectionate. The deepest relationship, he believes, is with one’s children; no other relationship so thoroughly involves commitment and love. 

“I don’t want to leave the world in a state of fright. I want to know what’s happening, accept it, get to a peaceful place, and let go.” 

Morrie wants to die fully present to his fate, not fearing or resisting it but accepting it; anything less would spoil the final moment of life.

“‘The truth is, part of me is every age. I’m a three-year-old, I’m a five-year-old, I’m a thirty-seven-year-old, I’m a fifty-year-old. I’ve been through all of them, and I know what it’s like. I delight in being a child when it’s appropriate to be a child. I delight in being a wise old man when it’s appropriate to be a wise old man. Think of all I can be! I am every age, up to my own. Do you understand?’ I nodded. ‘How can I be envious of where you are—when I’ve been there myself?’” 

Youth has its strength, but age has its wisdom. Morrie suggests that each, in its own time, has a part to play in a person’s life. Old age, despite its decrepitude, offers perspective and serenity unavailable to the young.

“Do you know how they brainwash people? They repeat something over and over. And that’s what we do in this country. Owning things is good. More money is good. More property is good. More commercialism is good. More is good. More is good. We repeat it—and have it repeated to us—over and over until nobody bothers to even think otherwise. The average person is so fogged up by all this, he has no perspective on what’s really important anymore.” 

The professor laments that Americans, beguiled by the drumbeat of marketing, focus too much on material things. They buy possessions as substitutes for love. Meaning and serenity escape them because they seek to get instead of give.

“‘Remember what I said about finding a meaningful life? I wrote it down, but now I can recite it: Devote yourself to loving others, devote yourself to your community around you, and devote yourself to creating something that gives you purpose and meaning. You notice,’ he added, grinning, ‘there’s nothing in there about a salary.’” 

What’s important, according to Morrie, isn’t how much money and power you amass but how much you contribute to others. Self-respect comes, not from possessions and prestige, but from giving from the heart. 

“‘[…] there are a few rules I know to be true about love and marriage: If you don’t respect the other person, you’re gonna have a lot of trouble. If you don’t know how to compromise, you’re gonna have a lot of trouble. If you can’t talk openly about what goes on between you, you’re gonna have a lot of trouble. And if you don’t have a common set of values in life, you’re gonna have a lot of trouble. Your values must be alike. And the biggest one of those values, Mitch?’ Yes? ‘Your belief in the importance of your marriage.’” 

Most people in Albom’s generation don’t really know who they are or who they should be with in a relationship. Morrie believes marriage is important, and people miss out if they don’t experience it. Marriage tests you; either you learn about yourselves and how to work together, or the marriage is in trouble. 

“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.” 

Morrie believes that, in the modern world, people focus on greed instead of fulfillment. It’s hard to think for oneself if everyone else is grasping and competing. Yet Morrie suggests that is what’s required if we want to live lives of satisfaction and meaning.

“I always wished I had done more with my work; I wished I had written more books. I used to beat myself up over it. Now I see that never did any good. Make peace. You need to make peace with yourself and everyone around you.” 

We all make mistakes in using our powers, and then we beat ourselves up about it, especially over the idea the we haven’t done enough. This simply wastes our energies. Forgiving ourselves allows us to free up that energy and use it constructively.

“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.”

For Morrie, the most important thing in life is to love other people. Doing so makes us immortal, in a way, because our love is remembered by others and contributes to their lives even after we’re gone. 

“And which are the important questions? ‘As I see it, they have to do with love, responsibility, spirituality, awareness. And if I were healthy today, those would still be my issues. They should have been all along.’” 

As death approaches, Morrie looks deeply into his own mind and realizes that even he underestimated the importance of the big issues, and that we all overlook those things, often until it’s too late. Morrie makes sure, though, that his final insights are shared with others, so that they can be of use to them. 

“None of us can undo what we’ve done, or relive a life already recorded. But if Professor Morris Schwartz taught me anything at all, it was this: there is no such thing as ‘too late’ in life. He was changing until the day he said good-bye.” 

Like his life of teaching, Morrie’s final months are a lesson about being open-hearted, inquisitive, loving, and ever-growing. His courage in facing his own demise, and in sharing his insights with others, challenge those he inspired to reach beyond their humdrum lives and grasp at the extraordinary in life.