June is a warm, sweet month, symbolic of many endings as well as beginnings. A school year ends, friends part, and memories begin to fade. Simultaneously, a glorious summer is unfolding, a fresh chance to enjoy life in the many sunny, ripe days to follow. As high school students, those endings and beginnings are transitions into new realms in life. Final scenes of friendships, hours in classrooms, and school days give us sorrow, but we all have a next stage in life to move upward to. We are young and life is waiting for us to come forth.
As teenagers, we are young and healthy. We can carry ourselves down the sidewalk, hit a ball across a field, tie back our hair, wash our hands and faces, sleep without wondering if the night would be our last, speak without choking because our lungs are in the middle of a slow, painful collapse. Amidst the sorrowful transitions and the appeal of new life stages, it’s easy to forget these small blessings. Tuesdays with Morrie by Mitch Albom is a short yet powerful book, a soft and truthful perspective on death, arousing waves of genuine gratitude for little blessings, 192 pages filled with gentle sorrow, honest delights, and philosophical inquiries that so many have struggled with. What is death? What does it mean to live?
Morrie Schwartz is a respected sociology professor in his seventies at Brandeis University in the city of Waltham, Massachusetts. He is a small man, like a “cross between a biblical prophet and a Christmas elf”. An unhappy childhood has made him strong, wise, and unashamed of displaying emotion. He enjoys dancing and does so freely. He routinely goes walking and swimming. He is a sage soul, full of empathy; his knowledge of life extends beyond the classroom. However, at this ripe age, he receives the dreaded death sentence of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, also known as ALS, or Lou Gehrig’s disease.
Mitch Albom, the narrator, is a quintessential American man, living as a busy journalist in Detroit, Michigan. Shortly after his college graduation, he experienced, for the first time, failures, shattered dreams, and the death of a strong figure in his life. His hopes crushed, he threw himself into earning money and making the most of his time before death. For him, life is more of a series of challenges to conquer, a bundle of accomplishments to seize. His life can be classified as decently successful, yet the reader can tell his mind feels hollow.
The two extraordinary different men first meet in the sociology classroom of Brandeis University sixteen years ago, one as a professor and the other as a student. Through the following years, the two form a genuine friendship, ending in Mitch’s promise at his graduation to keep in touch with his professor. This promise is kept after Morrie is diagnosed with ALS.
The book’s pure, quiet voice creates a flow and rhythm. Morrie’s body withering into a helpless shell is traced descriptively, but so is the refinement of his aged, beautiful spirit. Morrie welcomes this process, wanting to “narrate” the “final bridge between life and death”. Mitch, with his busy yet aimless midlife, soul dulled into mundanity, visits his old professor every Tuesday. Morrie and Mitch proudly give themselves the nickname “Tuesday people” as they converse freely about subjects many are reluctant to broach: love, work, family, money, friends, happiness, emotions, life and death, to be included in the “final thesis”—hence, this book. From the dying man, Mitch learns many things, and feels even more.
Dying is only one thing to be sad over…living unhappily is something else, Morrie says throughout the book, as his body decays and his soul grows wings. Although not without his moments of grief and bitterness, Morrie embraces the final pathway to the arms of death, the “great equalizer”. His unmasked, affluent love is a luminary: he weeps for victims of a shooting Bosnia, holds a “living funeral”, and imparts aphorisms to everyone around him that are pithy, poignant, and humorous at the same time. They radiate a warmth strong enough to melt hearts. Students of Westdale, what’s failing a test, being bullied, breaking up with someone, getting rejections from a university, to death? Yet here is a true story of a man grateful for this slow, creeping disease that will kill him by collapsing his lungs, because he is allotted time to say goodbye to loved ones, time to work with a student on his final thesis on the meaning of life.
Mitch Albom seems to be an accurate representation of us beside Morrie. He values efficiency, time, and money over tender emotions and deep relationships. He cares too much about what others think, to let emotions show through clearly. He’s accomplished many things, yet admits that he feels empty despite his full days. In a way, life has killed him.
Through his aged professor, death makes him live again. Learn how to die, and you learn how to live, Morrie tells him. The most important thing in life is to learn how to give out love, and to let it come in…we think we don’t deserve love…but love is the only rational act. Our passions and vulnerabilities, things society has taught us to hide, are painted as beautiful, soulful things. When Morrie finally leaves earth, the warm, shining waves of love he’s sent out has affected more people than he could have dreamed.
As the school year of 2019 draws to an end, some are off to a summer full of fun while some are leaving home for university. Some are looking wearily toward a grinding two months while others have still less uplifting options. No matter where life takes you next, don’t be afraid, because life always has blessings for you to find, whether you’re off to hockey practice, or you’ve received a death sentence. Learn to show your unfiltered emotions and love to others, because life is short and the world needs more beauty. Look around. How would you live if death was to meet you very soon? Death is not a morbid reaper. Rather, it is a fair, inevitable force that no one can avoid, the ultimate transition from mortality and earthliness to something ethereal.
Go out and live with courage and love. Learn to define life in your own words. Absorb the little luminaries around you. As the soulful book concludes, the teaching goes on.
(Published in The Sequitur, June 2019, Westdale Secondary School, Hamilton, ON)
