Tuesdays with Morrie: an old man, a young man, and life’s greatest lesson

by Mitch Albom

  “Remind me,” Morrie says. “Do the speech.”

  Through the open window I hear the sound of a garbage truck. Although it is hot, Morrie is wearing long sleeves, with a blanket over his legs, his skin pale. The disease owns him.

  I raise my voice and do the Gehrig imitation, where the words bounce off the stadium walls: “Too-dayyy … I feeel like … the luckiest maaaan … on the face of the earth …”

  Morrie closes his eyes and nods slowly.

  “Yeah. Well. I didn’t say that.”

  The Fifth Tuesday We Talk About Family

  It was the first week in September, back-to­school week, and after thirty-five consecutive autumns, my old professor did not have a class waiting for him on a college campus. Boston was teeming with students, double-parked on side streets, unloading trunks. And here was Morrie in his study. It seemed wrong, like those foot­ball players who finally retire and have to face that first Sunday at home, watching on TV, thinking, I could still do that. I have learned from dealing with those players that it is best to leave them alone when their old seasons come around. Don’t say anything. But then, I didn’t need to remind Morrie of his dwindling time.

  For our taped conversations, we had switched from handheld microphones—because it was too difficult now for Morrie to hold anything that long—to the lavaliere kind popular with TV newspeople. You can clip these onto a collar or lapel. Of course, since Morrie only wore soft cotton shirts that hung loosely on his ever-shrinking frame, the microphone sagged and flopped, and I had to reach over and adjust it frequently. Morrie seemed to en­joy this because it brought me close to him, in hugging range, and his need for physical affection was stronger than ever. When I leaned in, I heard his wheezing breath and his weak coughing, and he smacked his lips softly before he swallowed.

  “Well, my friend,” he said, “what are we talking about today?”

  How about family?

  “Family.” He mulled it over for a moment. “Well, you see mine, all around me.”

  He nodded to photos on his bookshelves, of Morrie as a child with his grandmother; Morrie as a young man with his brother, David; Morrie with his wife, Charlotte; Morrie with his two sons, Rob, a journalist in Tokyo, and ion, a computer expert in Boston.

  “I think, in light of what we’ve been talking about all these weeks, family becomes even more important,” he said.

  “The fact is, there is no foundation, no secure ground, upon which people may stand today if it isn’t the family. It’s become quite clear to me as I’ve been sick. 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.’”

  “Love each other or perish.” I wrote it down. Auden said that?

  “Love each other or perish,” Morrie said. “It’s good, no? And it’s so true. Without love, we are birds with broken wings.

  “Say I was divorced, or living alone, or had no chil­dren. This disease—what I’m going through—would be so much harder. I’m not sure I could do it. Sure, people would come visit, friends, associates, but it’s not the same as having someone who will not leave. It’s not the same as having someone whom you know has an eye on you, is watching you the whole time.

  “This is part of what a family is about, not just love, but letting others know there’s someone who is watching out for them. It’s what I missed so much when my mother died—what I call your ‘spiritual security’—know­ing that your family will be there watching out for you. Nothing else will give you that. Not money. Not fame.”

  He shot me a look.

  “Not work,” he added.

  Raising a family was one of those issues on my little list—things you want to get right before it’s too late. I told Morrie about my generation’s dilemma with having children, how we often saw them as tying us down, mak­ing us into these “parent” things that we did not want to be. I admitted to some of these emotions myself.

  Yet when I looked at Morrie, I wondered if I were in his shoes, about to die, and I had no family, no children, would the emptiness be unbearable? He had raised his two sons to be loving and caring, and like Morrie, they were not shy with their affection. Had he so desired, they would have stopped what they were doing to be with their father every minute of his final months. But that was not what he wanted.

  “Do not stop your lives,” he told them. “Otherwise, this disease will have ruined three of us instead of one.” In this way, even as he was dying, he showed respect for his children’s worlds. Little wonder that when they sat with him, there was a waterfall of affection, lots of kisses and jokes and crouching by the side of the bed, holding hands.

  “Whenever people ask me about having children or not having children, I never tell them what to do,” Mor­rie said now, looking at a photo of his oldest son. “I simply say, ‘There is no experience like having children.’ That’s all. There is no substitute for it. You cannot do it with a friend. You cannot do it with a lover. If you want the experience of having complete responsibility for an­other human being, and to learn how to love and bond in the deepest way, then you should have children.”

  So you would do it again? I asked.

  I glanced at the photo. Rob was kissing Morrie on the forehead, and Morrie was laughing with his eyes closed.

  “Would I do it again?” he said to me, looking sur­prised. “Mitch, I would not have missed that experience for anything. Even though … “

  He swallowed and put the picture in his lap.

  “Even though there is a painful price to pay,” he said. Because you’ll be leaving them.

  “Because I’ll be leaving them soon.”

  He pulled his lips together, closed his eyes, and I watched the first teardrop fall down the side of his cheek.

  “And now,” he whispered, “you talk.”

  Me?

  “Your family. I know about your parents. I met them, years ago, at graduation. You have a sister, too, right?” Yes, I said.

  “Older, yes?” Older.

  “And one brother, right?” I nodded.

  “Younger?”

  Younger.

  “Like me,” Morrie said. “I have a younger brother.”

  Like you, I said.

  “He also came to your graduation, didn’t he?”

  I blinked, and in my mind I saw us all there, sixteen years earlier, the hot sun, the blue robes, squinting as we put our arms around each other and posed for Instamatic photos, someone saying, “One, two, threeee … “

  “What is it?” Morrie said, noticing my sudden quiet. “What’s on your mind?”

  Nothing, I said, changing the subject.

  The truth is, I do indeed have a brother, a blond­haired, hazel-eyed, two-years-younger brother, who looks so unlike me or my dark-haired sister that we used to tease him by claiming strangers had left him as a baby on our doorstep. “And one day,” we’d say, “they’re coming back to get you.” He cried when we said this, but we said it just the same.

  He grew up the way many youngest children grow up, pampered, adored, and inwardly tortured. He dreamed of being an actor or a singer; he reenacted TV shows at the dinner table, playing every part, his bright smile practically jumping through his lips. I was the good student, he was the bad; I was obedient, he broke the rules; I stayed away from drugs and alcohol, he tried ev­erything you could ingest. He moved to Europe not long after high school, preferring the more casual lifestyle he found there. Yet he remained the family favorite. When he visited home, in his wild and funny presence, I often felt stiff and conservative.

  As different as we were, I reasoned that our fates would shoot in opposite directions once we hit adulthood. I was right in all ways but one. From the day my uncle died, I believed that I would suffer a similar death, an untimely disease that would take me out. So I worked at a feverish pace, and I braced myself for cancer. I could feel its breath. I knew it was comi
ng. I waited for it the way a condemned man waits for the executioner.

  And I was right. It came.

  But it missed me.

  It struck my brother.

  The same type of cancer as my uncle. The pancreas. A rare form. And so the youngest of our family, with the blond hair and the hazel eyes, had the chemotherapy and the radiation. His hair fell out, his face went gaunt as a skeleton. It’s supposed to be me, I thought. But my brother was not me, and he was not my uncle. He was a fighter, and had been since his youngest days, when we wrestled in the basement and he actually bit through my shoe until I screamed in pain and let him go.

  And so he fought back. He battled the disease in Spain, where he lived, with the aid of an experimental drug that was not—and still is not—available in the United States. He flew all over Europe for treatments. After five years of treatment, the drug appeared to chase the cancer into remission.

  That was the good news. The bad news was, my brother did not want me around—not me, nor anyone in the family. Much as we tried to call and visit, he held us at bay, insisting this fight was something he needed to do by himself. Months would pass without a word from him. Messages on his answering machine would go without reply. I was ripped with guilt for what I felt I should be doing for him and fueled with anger for his denying us the right to do it.

  So once again, I dove into work. I worked because I could control it. I worked because work was sensible and responsive. And each time I would call my brother’s apartment in Spain and get the answering machine—him speaking in Spanish, another sign of how far apart we had drifted—I would hang up and work some more.

  Perhaps this is one reason I was drawn to Morrie. He let me be where my brother would not.

  Looking back, perhaps Morrie knew this all along.

  It is a winter in my childhood, on a snow packed hill in our suburban neighborhood. My brother and I are on the sled, him on top, me on the bottom. I feel his chin on my shoulder and his feet on the backs of my knees.

  The sled rumbles on icy patches beneath us. We pick up speed as we descend the hill.

  “CAR!” someone yells.

  We see it coming, down the street to our left. We scream and try to steer away, but the runners do not move. The driver slams his horn and hits his brakes, and we do what all kids do: we jump off. In our hooded parkas, we roll like logs down the cold, wet snow, thinking the next thing to touch us will be the hard rubber of a car tire. We are yelling “AHHHHHH” and we are tingling with fear, turning over and over, the world upside down, right side up, upside down.

  And then, nothing. We stop rolling and catch our breath and wipe the dripping snow from our faces. The driver turns down the street, wagging his finger. We are safe. Our sled has thudded quietly into a snowbank, and ourfriends are slapping us now, saying “Cool” and “You could have died.”

  I grin at my brother, and we are united by childish pride. That wasn’t so hard, we think, and we are ready to take on death again.

  The Sixth Tuesday We Talk About Emotions

  I walked past the mountain laurels and the Japa­nese maple, up the bluestone steps of Morrie’s house. The white rain gutter hung like a lid over the doorway. I rang the bell and was greeted not by Connie but by Morrie’s wife, Charlotte, a beautiful gray-haired woman who spoke in a lilting voice. She was not often at home when I came by—she continued working at MIT, as Morrie wished—and I was surprised this morning to see her.

  “Morrie’s having a bit of a hard time today,” she said. She stared over my shoulder for a moment, then moved toward the kitchen.

  I’m sorry, I said.

  “No, no, he’ll be happy to see you,” she said quickly. “Sure …”

  She stopped in the middle of the sentence, turning her head slightly, listening for something. Then she con­tinued. “I’m sure … he’ll feel better when he knows you’re here.”

  I lifted up the bags from the market—my normal food supply, I said jokingly—and she seemed to smile and fret at the same time.

  “There’s already so much food. He hasn’t eaten any from last time.”

  This took me by surprise. He hasn’t eaten any, I asked?

  She opened the refrigerator and I saw familiar con­tainers of chicken salad, vermicelli, vegetables, stuffed squash, all things I had brought for Morrie. She opened the freezer and there was even more.

  “Morrie can’t eat most of this food. It’s too hard for him to swallow. He has to eat soft things and liquid drinks now.”

  But he never said anything, I said.

  Charlotte smiled. “He doesn’t want to hurt your feel­ings.”

  It wouldn’t have hurt my feelings. I just wanted to help in some way. I mean, I just wanted to bring him something …

  “You are bringing him something. He looks forward to your visits. He talks about having to do this project with you, how he has to concentrate and put the time aside. I think it’s giving him a good sense of pur­pose …”

  Again, she gave that faraway look, the tuning-in-­something-from-somewhere-else. I knew Morrie’s nights were becoming difficult, that he didn’t sleep through them, and that meant Charlotte often did not sleep through them either. Sometimes Morrie would lie awake coughing for hours—it would take that long to get the phlegm from his throat. There were health care workers now staying through the night and all those visitors dur­ing the day, former students, fellow professors, meditation teachers, tramping in and out of the house. On some days, Morrie had a half a dozen visitors, and they were often there when Charlotte returned from work. She han­dled it with patience, even though all these outsiders were soaking up her precious minutes with Morrie.

  “… a sense of purpose,” she continued. “Yes. That’s good, you know.”

  “I hope so,” I said.

  I helped put the new food inside the refrigerator. The kitchen counter had all kinds of notes, messages, informa­tion, medical instructions. The table held more pill bottles than ever—Selestone for his asthma, Ativan to help him sleep, naproxen for infections—along with a powdered milk mix and laxatives. From down the hall, we heard the sound of a door open.

  “Maybe he’s available now … let me go check.”

  Charlotte glanced again at my food and I felt suddenly ashamed. All these reminders of things Morrie would never enjoy.

  The small horrors of his illness were growing, and when I finally sat down with Morrie, he was coughing more than usual, a dry, dusty cough that shook his chest and made his head jerk forward. After one violent surge, he stopped, closed his eyes, and took a breath. I sat quietly because I thought he was recovering from his exertion.

  “Is the tape on?” he said suddenly, his eyes still closed.

  Yes, yes, I quickly said, pressing down the play and record buttons.

  “What I’m doing now,” he continued, his eyes still closed, “is detaching myself from the experience.”

  Detaching yourself?

  “Yes. Detaching myself. And this is important—not just for someone like me, who is dying, but for someone like you, who is perfectly healthy. Learn to detach.”

  He opened his eyes. He exhaled. “You know what the Buddhists say? Don’t cling to things, because every­thing is impermanent.”

  But wait, I said. Aren’t you always talking about expe­riencing life? All the good emotions, all the bad ones?

  “Yes. “

  Well, how can you do that if you’re detached?

  “Ah. You’re thinking, Mitch. But detachment doesn’t mean you don’t let the experience penetrate you. On the contrary, you let it penetrate you fully. That’s how you are able to leave it.”

  I’m lost.

  “Take any emotion—love for a woman, or grief for a loved one, or what I’m going through, fear and pain from a deadly illness. If you hold back on the emotions—if you don’t allow yourself to go all the way through them—you can never get to being detached, you’re too busy being afraid. You’re afraid of the pain, you’re afraid of th
e grief. You’re afraid of the vulnerability that loving entails.

  “But by throwing yourself into these emotions, by allowing yourself to dive in, all the way, over your head even, you experience them fully and completely. You know what pain is. You know what love is. You know what grief is. And only then can you say, ‘All right. I have experienced that emotion. I recognize that emotion. Now I need to detach from that emotion for a mo­ment.’”

  Morrie stopped and looked me over, perhaps to make sure I was getting this right.

  “I know you think this is just about dying,” he said, “but it’s like I keep telling you. When you learn how to die, you learn how to live.”

  Morrie talked about his most fearful moments, when he felt his chest locked in heaving surges or when he wasn’t sure where his next breath would come from. These were horrifying times, he said, and his first emo­tions were horror, fear, anxiety. But once he recognized the feel of those emotions, their texture, their moisture, the shiver down the back, the quick flash of heat that crosses your brain—then he was able to say, “Okay. This is fear. Step away from it. Step away.”

  I thought about how often this was needed in every­day life. How we feel lonely, sometimes to the point of tears, but we don’t let those tears come because we are not supposed to cry. Or how we feel a surge of love for a partner but we don’t say anything because we’re frozen with the fear of what those words might do to the rela­tionship.

  Morrie’s approach was exactly the opposite. Turn on the faucet. Wash yourself with the emotion. It won’t hurt you. It will only help. If you let the fear inside, if you pull it on like a familiar shirt, then you can say to yourself, “All right, it’s just fear, I don’t have to let it control me. I see it for what it is.”

  Same for loneliness: you let go, let the tears flow, feel it completely—but eventually be able to say, “All right, that was my moment with loneliness. I’m not afraid of feeling lonely, but now I’m going to put that loneliness aside and know that there are other emotions in the world, and I’m going to experience them as well.”