by Mitch Albom
I entered, pushing a smile onto my face. He wore a yellow pajama-like top, and a blanket covered him from the chest down. The lump of his form was so withered that I almost thought there was something missing. He was as small as a child.
Morrie’s mouth was open, and his skin was pale and tight against his cheekbones. When his eyes rolled toward me, he tried to speak, but I heard only a soft grunt.
There he is, I said, mustering all the excitement I could find in my empty till.
He exhaled, shut his eyes, then smiled, the very effort seeming to tire him.
“My … dear friend …” he finally said.
I am your friend, I said.
“I’m not … so good today …”
Tomorrow will be better.
He pushed out another breath and forced a nod. He was struggling with something beneath the sheets, and I realized he was trying to move his hands toward the opening.
“Hold …” he said.
I pulled the covers down and grasped his fingers. They disappeared inside my own. I leaned in close, a few inches from his face. It was the first time I had seen him unshaven, the small white whiskers looking so out of place, as if someone had shaken salt neatly across his cheeks and chin. How could there be new life in his beard when it was draining everywhere else?
Morrie, I said softly.
“Coach,” he corrected.
Coach, I said. I felt a shiver. He spoke in short bursts, inhaling air, exhaling words. His voice was thin and raspy. He smelled of ointment.
“You … are a good soul.”
A good soul.
“Touched me …” he whispered. He moved my hands to his heart. “Here.”
It felt as if I had a pit in my throat.
Coach?
“Ahh?”
I don’t know how to say good-bye.
He patted my hand weakly, keeping it on his chest.
“This … is how we say … good-bye …”
He breathed softly, in and out, I could feel his rib-cage rise and fall. Then he looked right at me.
“Love … you,” he rasped.
I love you, too, Coach.
“Know you do … know … something else …”
What else do you know?
“You … always have …”
His eyes got small, and then he cried, his face contorting like a baby who hasn’t figured how his tear ducts work. I held him close for several minutes. I rubbed his loose skin. I stroked his hair. I put a palm against his face and felt the bones close to the flesh and the tiny wet tears, as if squeezed from a dropper.
When his breathing approached normal again, I cleared my throat and said I knew he was tired, so I would be back next Tuesday, and I expected him to be a little more alert, thank you. He snorted lightly, as close as he could come to a laugh. It was a sad sound just the same.
I picked up the unopened bag with the tape recorder. Why had I even brought this? I knew we would never use it. I leaned in and kissed him closely, my face against his, whiskers on whiskers, skin on skin, holding it there, longer than normal, in case it gave him even a split second of pleasure.
Okay, then? I said, pulling away.
I blinked back the tears, and he smacked his lips together and raised his eyebrows at the sight of my face. I like to think it was a fleeting moment of satisfaction for my dear old professor: he had finally made me cry.
“Okay, then,” he whispered.
Graduation
Morrie died on a Saturday morning.
His immediate family was with him in the house. Rob made it in from Tokyo—he got to kiss his father good-bye—and Jon was there, and of course Charlotte was there and Charlotte’s cousin Marsha, who had written the poem that so moved Morrie at his “unofficial” memorial service, the poem that likened him to a “tender sequoia.” They slept in shifts around his bed. Morrie had fallen into a coma two days after our final visit, and the doctor said he could go at any moment. Instead, he hung on, through a tough afternoon, through a dark night.
Finally, on the fourth of November, when those he loved had left the room just for a moment—to grab coffee in the kitchen, the first time none of them were with him since the coma began—Morrie stopped breathing.
And he was gone.
I believe he died this way on purpose. I believe he wanted no chilling moments, no one to witness his last breath and be haunted by it, the way he had been haunted by his mother’s death-notice telegram or by his father’s corpse in the city morgue.
I believe he knew that he was in his own bed, that his books and his notes and his small hibiscus plant were nearby. He wanted to go serenely, and that is how he went.
The funeral was held on a damp, windy morning. The grass was wet and the sky was the color of milk. We stood by the hole in the earth, close enough to hear the pond water lapping against the edge and to see ducks shaking off their feathers.
Although hundreds of people had wanted to attend, Charlotte kept this gathering small, just a few close friends and relatives. Rabbi Axelrad read a few poems. Morrie’s brother, David—who still walked with a limp from his childhood polio—lifted the shovel and tossed dirt in the grave, as per tradition.
At one point, when Morrie’s ashes were placed into the ground, I glanced around the cemetery. Morrie was right. It was indeed a lovely spot, trees and grass and a sloping hill.
“You talk, I’ll listen,” he had said.
I tried doing that in my head and, to my happiness, found that the imagined conversation felt almost natural. I looked down at my hands, saw my watch and realized why.
It was Tuesday.
“My father moved through theys of we,
singing each new leaf out of each tree
(and every child was sure that spring
danced when she heard my father sing) …”
—A POEM BY E. E. CUMMINGS, READ BY MORRIE’S SON, ROB, AT THE MEMORIAL SERVICE
Conclusion
I look back sometimes at the person I was before I rediscovered my old professor. I want to talk to that person. I want to tell him what to look out for, what mistakes to avoid. I want to tell him to be more open, to ignore the lure of advertised values, to pay attention when your loved ones are speaking, as if it were the last time you might hear them.
Mostly I want to tell that person to get on an airplane and visit a gentle old man in West Newton, Massachusetts, sooner rather than later, before that old man gets sick and loses his ability to dance.
I know I cannot do this. 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.
Not long after Morrie’s death, I reached my brother in Spain. We had a long talk. I told him I respected his distance, and that all I wanted was to be in touch—in the present, not just the past—to hold him in my life as much as he could let me.
“You’re my only brother,” I said. “I don’t want to lose you. I love you.”
I had never said such a thing to him before.
A few days later, I received a message on my fax machine. It was typed in the sprawling, poorly punctuated, all-cap-letters fashion that always characterized my brother’s words.
“HI I’VE JOINED THE NINETIES!” it began. He wrote a few little stories, what he’d been doing that week, a couple of jokes. At the end, he signed off this way:
I HAVE HEARTBURN AND DIAHREA AT THE MOMENT—LIFE’S A BITCH. CHAT LATER?
[signed] SORE TUSH.
I laughed until there were tears in my eyes.
This book was largely Morrie’s idea. He called it our “final thesis.” Like the best of work projects, it brought us closer together, and Morrie was delighted when several publishers expressed interest, even though he died before meeting any of them. The advance money helped pay Morrie’s enormous medical bills, and for that we were both grateful.
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.
After Morrie died, I went through boxes of old college material. And I discovered a final paper I had written for one of his classes. It was twenty years old now. On the front page were my penciled comments scribbled to Morrie, and beneath them were his comments scribbled back.
Mine began, “Dear Coach …”
His began, “Dear Player …”
For some reason, each time I read that, I miss him more.
Have you ever really had a teacher? One who saw you as a raw but precious thing, a jewel that, with wisdom, could be polished to a proud shine? If you are lucky enough to find your way to such teachers, you will always find your way back. Sometimes it is only in your head. Sometimes it is right alongside their beds.
The last class of my old professor’s life took place once a week, in his home, by a window in his study where he could watch a small hibiscus plant shed its pink flowers. The class met on Tuesdays. No books were required. The subject was the meaning of life. It was taught from experience.
The teaching goes on.
Afterword
Dear Reader—
It has been ten years since this book was published, and on the occasion of that anniversary, I have been asked to add a few reflections. That is no small task. The book changed my life and, if I am to believe readers around the world, changed the lives of others as well. Where do I begin?
Perhaps with an incident that I didn’t include in the original manuscript. I meant to, but for some reason I left it out. So here it is, all these years later:
When I first phoned Morrie Schwartz, my old professor, who at this point was in the terrible grip of ALS, I felt I needed to reintroduce myself. After all, it had been sixteen years since we had spoken. Would he even remember my name? Back in college, I used to call Morrie “Coach.” Who knows why? A sports thing even then, I guess. Hi, Coach. How you doing, Coach?
Anyway, that day on the phone, when I heard him say “Hello,” I swallowed and said, “Morrie, my name is Mitch Albom. I was a student of yours in the 1970s. I don’t know if you remember me.”
And this is the first thing he said:
“How come you didn’t call me Coach?”
My journey began with that sentence. It took me through that phone call, through my first guilt-laden visit to West Newton, through all the Tuesday visits that followed, through Morrie’s slow, agonizing decay and his quiet, dignified death. It took me through his funeral, through my private mourning, through the days in my basement writing the pages you have here, through the small initial printing of this book, and through the unexpected two hundred printings that have followed. It took me through this country, through many other countries, through seeing this book taught in schools and read at weddings and funerals. It took me through thousands upon thousands of letters and e-mails and comments and teary hugs from strangers, all of which could be summed up the same way: Your story moved us.
But it was not my story.
It was Morrie’s story, Morrie’s invitation. Morrie’s last class. I was the invited party.
How come you didn’t call me Coach?
I forgot. He remembered.
And that was the difference between us.
Morrie has changed me in that way. I remember everything now. How can I not? I am asked about my old professor almost every day of my life, and I often joke that this book is his revenge for my ignoring him for all those years. I am now his eternal graduate student, coming back every fall, spring, and summer for the same class, over and over. That’s okay. I always felt Morrie had something to teach. I felt it thirty years ago when he had sideburns and wore yellow turtlenecks and gestured wildly with his hands in front of a classroom, and I felt it years later, after the awful disease left him frail and motionless on a lounge chair in his home, his voice a whisper, his body so weak I needed to turn his head just so he could see me.
Then, as before, he was wise and loving. And he proved, as he once hoped he would be, a teacher to the end.
As proof, when I began thinking about this afterword, I went back to my notes from our conversations together. I had transcribed all the tapes and organized them into subjects. As I meandered through, hearing Morrie’s voice again, I wondered if I would happen upon something that would ring a new chime, something I could share here that would make fresh sense given all that has happened.
And I came upon this subject: “Life after death.”
Now, Morrie, by his own admission, had been an agnostic for many years. But after his diagnosis of ALS, he began to explore. To rethink. He delved into religious teachings. On a Tuesday in August 1995, according to my notes, we spoke about this. Morrie told me he once believed that death was cold and final. “You go in the ground and that’s it.”
But now he felt differently.
What is your concept now, I asked?
“I have not settled on one yet …” he said, honest as always. “However, this is too harmonious, grand, and overwhelming a universe to believe that it’s all an accident.”
What a thing for a onetime agnostic to say. Too harmonious, grand, and overwhelming a universe to believe that it’s all an accident? This, remember, was when Morrie’s body was an empty husk, when he needed to be washed and groomed, when he needed his nose blown and his bottom wiped. Harmonious? Grand? If he could find the world’s majesty from such a decayed and difficult posture, how hard could it be for the rest of us?
People often ask what I miss about Morrie. I miss that belief in humanity. I miss the eyes that could view life so encouragingly. And I miss his laugh. I really do. The same day that Morrie spoke of life after death, he shared his reincarnation wish, saying that if he could come back as anything, he’d like to be a gazelle. In rereading the transcripts, I see that I made a wisecrack after he said that.
“The good news is you’d be reincarnated,” I said. “The bad news is you’d be in the desert somewhere.”
And he said, “Right.” And he cracked up.
We laughed a lot that way. Maybe it’s hard to believe, with death hovering in the corner, but we did. Nobody liked to laugh more than Morrie. Nobody could milk a corny joke longer. I’m telling you, there were days where I could do a knock-knock joke and he’d go to pieces.
So I miss that. And his patience. And his academic references. And his love of food. And the way he closed his eyes when he listened to music.
Still, what I miss most, simple and maybe selfish as it sounds, is the twinkle in Morrie’s eyes when I came in the room. But when someone is happy—genuinely happy—to see you, it melts you from the start. It is like going home. Those Tuesdays when I entered his study with the hibiscus plant by the window, whatever I dragged in with me—personal drama, work issues, burdensome thoughts—it was all washed away when Morrie greeted me, because he truly wanted to be with me. His eyes crinkled and his ears pulled up and his mouth made that funny, crooked-tooth smile and I was welcome. Others have told me they felt the same way with Morrie. Perhaps his ravaging disease stripped him of distractions, erased the kind of preoccupation with daily details that absorb the rest of us, allowed him to be “fully present.” Perhaps he just cherished his time more. I don’t know.
All I know is those Tuesdays we spent together felt like one long hug from a man who couldn’t move his arms. I miss that most of all.
In the ten years since this book was published, I have been asked countless times if I expected it to become so widely read. My answer is usually a head shake, a smile, and a “Not in a million years.” The truth is, the book initially had a hard time finding a home—numerous publishers were uninterested in it; one even told me I had no idea what a memoir was. Under other circumstances, I might have given up on the idea.
The reason I did not, and the reason I believe the book found a place in people�
�s hearts, was because I wasn’t trying to write a popular book. I was trying to help Morrie pay his medical bills. As such, I was more dogged and less deterred. I kept going until I found a publisher. And when I told Morrie that I had—and that we could pay his bills—he cried. I often say for me that was the end of Tuesdays with Morrie even though I had barely begun writing it. I had done what I wanted—one small act of kindness in return for the countless acts he had shown me. But the journey, in truth, had hardly started.
Since then, the book has been published in dozens of countries I have never visited and translated into numerous languages I cannot read or speak. It was adapted into a TV movie, and the great Jack Lemmon told me that Morrie was his favorite role. A stage play was written and performed in theaters across the continent. School systems, universities, funeral homes, hospices, churches, synagogues, book groups, and charities have embraced the book.
I can never put into words how humbled I am by all this, and how proud I am for Morrie that his gentle wisdom is settling like a snowfall on various streets around the world. It certainly has made me agree with his sentiment: the universe is indeed too grand and harmonious to believe it’s all an accident.
So I hope this book keeps opening eyes about ALS, until we wipe out the disease. And I hope this book keeps reminding people how precious our time with one another is. And I hope it always celebrates teachers, our most precious resource. And I hope, wherever Morrie is now, he is dancing. Because he deserves to do that again.
When I asked him on that day for a perfect afterlife scenario, this is what he chose: “That my consciousness goes on … That I’m part of the universe.”
I think about all the people who have read this book, and all those who still will, and I believe, with enormous gratitude, that Morrie’s wish came true.
Mitch Albom
July 2007
MITCH ALBOM is the author of six previous books. A nationally syndicated columnist for the Detroit Free Press and a nationally syndicated radio host for ABC and WJR-AM, Albom has, for more than a decade, been named top sports columnist in the nation by the Sports Editors of America, the highest honor in the field. A panelist on ESPN’s Sports Reporters, Albom also regularly serves as a commentator for that network. He serves on numerous charitable boards and has founded two charities in metropolitan Detroit: The Dream Fund, which helps underprivileged youth study the arts, and A Time to Help, a monthly volunteer program. He lives with his wife, Janine, in Michigan.