Tuesdays with Morrie

The classroom was not what you'd expect. No desks, no chalkboard, no syllabus pinned to a bulletin board. Instead, the lessons took place in a home study in a modest house outside Boston, where a dying man sat in an easy chair, his body slowly betraying him. The professor was Morrie Schwartz. The student was Mitch Albom, a former Brandeis University sociology major who hadn't seen his old teacher in sixteen years. The subject was The Meaning of Life, taught from experience.

No grades were given, but there were oral exams each week. You were expected to respond to questions and to pose questions of your own. You were also required to perform physical tasks now and then—lifting the professor's head to a comfortable spot on the pillow, placing his glasses on the bridge of his nose. Kissing him good-bye earned you extra credit. No books were required, yet many topics were covered: love, work, community, family, aging, forgiveness, and finally, death. The last lecture was brief, only a few words. A funeral was held in lieu of graduation.

This is how Mitch Albom opens Tuesdays with Morrie, and it tells you everything you need to know about what you're about to hear. This is not a typical book about dying. It's a book about a classroom where the teacher is both instructor and living textbook, where the curriculum emerges from a man who has decided to make his own death his final project.

Morrie Schwartz had been a sociology professor at Brandeis for thirty-five years. He loved to dance—Lindy, free style, anything. He'd close his eyes, blissful smile spreading across his face, and move to his own sense of rhythm. The music didn't matter: rock and roll, big band, the blues. He loved them all. But in his seventies, he developed a persistent cough. Then he started falling. The diagnosis came in 1994: amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, ALS, Lou Gehrig's disease. A terminal neurological illness that would slowly, methodically strip away his ability to move, to eat, to breathe.

Most people would have retreated. Morrie did the opposite. He decided to turn his dying into a teaching opportunity. He invited people to visit and discuss their problems. He held informal study groups. He even conducted a "living funeral" so friends and family could say their goodbyes while he was still there to hear them. And when his aphorisms about life and death found their way to The Boston Globe, and then to Ted Koppel's Nightline, a former student happened to be watching.

That student was Mitch Albom, who had graduated from Brandeis in 1979 after writing an honors thesis under Morrie's guidance. At graduation, Morrie had pulled Mitch aside and asked him to stay in touch. Mitch promised he would. He didn't. Sixteen years passed. Mitch became a sports journalist, a workaholic climbing the ladder, chasing bigger paychecks and bylines. He lost contact with college friends, abandoned his musical dreams, and built a life that looked successful from the outside but felt hollow from within.

Then came that Friday night, flipping channels, and there was Morrie on television. The old professor, gaunt but still quick to smile, talking about facing death with dignity. Mitch watched, remembered his promise, and felt something stir. He called Morrie. They agreed to meet.

What followed was a series of fourteen Tuesdays. Mitch would fly from Detroit to Boston, walk into Morrie's home, and sit beside his dying teacher. They talked about everything. About death and why we pretend it won't happen to us. About the fear of aging and the wisdom that comes with it. About money and why we chase it even when it leaves us empty. About family, about forgiveness, about love.

Morrie was open about what was happening to his body. He let Mitch help lift him from his wheelchair, showed him how to adjust his position in the armchair, allowed him to witness the humiliating details of a body shutting down. In return, Morrie gave Mitch something he hadn't realized he'd lost: permission to feel, to care, to question whether the life he was living was actually the life he wanted.

The conversations were recorded. Mitch brought a tape recorder, wanting to preserve Morrie's voice, and Morrie agreed because he wanted his story heard. This book, the one you're about to experience, is the term paper Morrie asked Mitch to write. It's the final thesis of a professor who taught until his last breath.

Morrie had a saying: "Giving is living." He believed that the meaning of life comes from loving others, from devoting yourself to your community, from creating something that gives you purpose. None of that, he noted with a grin, had anything to do with a salary.

As Mitch walked into that home study for the first time in sixteen years, he had no idea what he was about to receive. He thought he was visiting an old teacher out of obligation. He didn't know he was about to enroll in the most important class of his life—a class with no credits, no diploma, and a final exam that would change everything.

What would you be willing to learn from someone who had nothing left to lose but everything left to teach?