Tuesdays With Morrie

The purpose of this research is to examine the book Tuesdays With Morrie by Mitch Albom with respect to ways in which it expresses life-span development and transition and contributes to an understanding of the content and structure of end-of-life issues. The plan of the research will be to set forth the pattern of ideas and events in the text and then to discuss the means by which an elaboration of an individual life reaches meaning in regard to more general experience and serves as an example of the human potential for psychoemotional growth and enrichment.

In Tuesdays With Morrie, Albom gives an account of his reconnection and rekindled friendship with a beloved professor some 18 years after graduation from Brandeis University in the few months before the professor's death from the neurological wasting disorder ALS, also called Lou Gehrig's disease. The narrative is "about" Albom, who at the time he made contact with Morrie Schwartz was a rising star of American sports reporting but somewhat disenchanted by his go-go careerism and emotional dislocations, but it is also--and chiefly--a compendium of end-of-life ruminations on the possibilities and joys of life amid the certainties of death.

Over the course of some six months, Albom made visits to the failing Morrie, each time engaging in conversation on a particular aspect of emotional and social experience, such as feeling sorry for yourself, regrets, the fear of aging, love, family, culture, forgiveness, etc. The text d

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he had experienced with his professor when in college, "as if I'd simply been on a long vacation" (1997, p. 34). At the same time, he was overwhelmed by the physical deterioration and the physical evidence of certitude of Morrie's terminal state. It was Morrie, Albom explains, who brought the subject of death into the open, as a mechanism of psychosocial critique: "Dying," Morrie suddenly said, "is only one thing to be sad over, Mitch. Living unhappily is something else. . . . "I may be dying, but I am surrounded by loving, caring souls. How many people can say that?" (Albom, 1997, pp. 35-36). The context of loving kindness having been established, the text covers the coverage by Albom and Morrie of a host of issues over most of the last fourteen Tuesdays of Morrie's life, interspersed with Albom's memories of Morrie in healthier days and observations on the quality of Albom's own life and the quality of life as most people experience it. As a Detroit Free Press sportswriter, Albom says, he had many enviable assignments, such as covering Wimbeldon tennis in England. However, after making contact with the dying Morrie, Albom found himself increasingly struck by the emptiness that so much filled the lives of people in the mid-1

Category: Literature - T