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 distills these conversations and supplies additional memoir commentary that seems meant to honor what can be interpreted as Morrie's aggressive embrace of life, not just in the weeks before death but across the years, and his determination to invite others to be aggressive toward life as well.
Albom sets the stage for the months of Tuesdays that he spent with Morrie by explaining that Morrie, whom he nicknamed "Coach," was his favorite professor (of sociology...