It’s hard to write anything about “Tuesdays with Morrie” without making it sound like another overdone, stale storyline of a brilliant, aging professor and his eager protégé. However, this non-fiction memoir shines a light on its protagonist, Morrie, in such a realistic, touching way that it has the ability to stir emotion in even the most skeptical of readers.
Morrie Schwartz—an enlightened, elderly sociology professor at Brandeis University—has lived a long life of eating delicious food, teaching meaningful lectures and dancing his nights away to his favorite songs. Now, at the age of 78, he spends his days resigned to a chair in his study, struggling with a fatal, degenerative disease that cripples his body day by day.
In spite of the prevailing disease and physical deterioration, “Tuesdays with Morrie” is not a book about death; rather, it is very much a book about life.
As his own life ebbs away, Morrie dedicates himself to teaching a final class: a one-on-one course on what it means to be alive.
Mitch, a former student of Morrie’s, tells the story in the form of a memoir. As a collegiate, he spent countless days with Morrie—sharing lunches, tossing ideas back and forth with his mentor and writing an honors thesis.
However, since his days at Brandeis, Mitch has become estranged from Morrie and from his youthful ideals, forsaking his dreams of leading a fulfilling life and choosing a lucrative, time-consuming career instead.
Physically, Morrie is a withered version of the man he once was. Yet Mitch’s anxiety also stems from changes in himself; after all these years, he too is a faded version of whom he used to be.
To Mitch’s surprise, it doesn’t take long until he and Morrie resume the relationship they once shared. Morrie is once again the knowledgeable professor and Mitch becomes the dedicated student. This time, however, their “class” has a purpose on a much greater scale than anything Mitch encountered while in college. The tuition is different too: rather than money, the cost of this particular lesson is the very existence of his professor.
Morrie’s weekly “classes” span all the lessons he has learned throughout his 78 years, including before and during his disease. He talks about everything deemed “important”—family, society, money—and then creates a place for each in the hierarchy of a meaningful life.
He addresses societal norms head-on, claiming they have managed to skew what people accept as valuable. He points out how many people spend their lives striving to attain superficial goals, consequently ending up unhappy and dissatisfied when they find their lives void of any meaning. As Mitch gradually begins to grasp the meaning of life, his professor inches closer and closer to death.
Morrie’s stories all point to the same moral: the solution to many of life’s problems are not as complicated as we might think.
When we get bogged down with society, culture and ourselves, we begin to find the wrong things paramount while ignoring the most important, and usually simplest, parts of life.
Right away it’s clear to see Morrie is a curious type of person capable of great emotion and appreciation for the world around him. Rather than making him bitter, his disease manages to enlighten him even further; as he floats in the murky limbo between a sickly existence and death, he reflects on what it means to live meaningfully while soaking up the small, yet numerous joys around him.
Astoundingly, the wizened, paralyzed professor stretched out on his deathbed describes himself as “lucky.”
If it were fiction, it would be easy to write off “Tuesday’s with Morrie” as another self-help book, another cliché plea to the reader to enjoy every day to its fullest. But Morrie isn’t just some fictitious, unapproachable character in a book. He was a real man, a real professor with real advice for anyone willing to listen.
As the book goes on, the reader finds it increasingly easy to picture Morrie’s gray hair or even hear his wise, high-pitched voice until it seems that it is actually them sitting beside Morrie in his study, eagerly anticipating a conversation with a man willing to present his own life as his final lesson.
