Tuesday’s With Morrie
Introduction
Tuesdays with Morrie follows the story of Morrie Schwartz, a professor of sociology, and his favourite student Mitch Albom.
Years after graduating from university, Mitch becomes consumed by the fast pace of life. Chasing career success, money, and achievement, he slowly drifts away from the values and relationships that once grounded him. Morrie, meanwhile, is diagnosed with ALS, a terminal illness that gradually takes away his physical abilities, while leaving his mind and spirit remarkably alive.
After seeing Morrie interviewed on television, Mitch reconnects with the professor who once shaped so much of his thinking. What begins as a simple visit soon turns into a weekly tradition. Every Tuesday, Mitch visits Morrie at his home, where the two sit together beside a particular window, quietly watching a hibiscus plant sway outside. As the weeks pass and the seasons slowly change, the hibiscus becomes a subtle reflection of life itself. Fragile, temporary, yet still beautiful in every stage.
From that small room, beside that window, Morrie shares lessons on life’s most important questions. Love, family, death, forgiveness, meaning, fear, and what it truly means to live a fulfilling life. Through these conversations, he teaches Mitch that life is not measured by status, wealth, or achievement, but by the depth of our relationships and the love we give to others.
At its heart, Tuesdays with Morrie is not simply a story about dying. It is a story about learning how to live. A reminder that even in the face of loss and mortality, there is still beauty to be found in presence, gratitude, and human connection.
First Encounter:
On the first encounter, their meeting is more of a reunion than a lesson. Following Mitch Albom’s graduation some fifteen years earlier, he had promised Morrie Schwartz that he would stay in touch. The opposite would become true. Mitch was slowly consumed by the rat race of status, achievement, career progression, and financial success. Like many people, he became so focused on building a life that he unintentionally drifted away from the people who once helped shape it.
Albom carried a quiet shame within him for never reconnecting. Had he not stumbled across a random interview with Morrie on television one night, he may never have known his old professor was dying. Even worse, he may have only discovered it after Morrie had already passed away.
The first passage that truly captured my attention was when Morrie stated:
“You know, Mitch, now that I’m dying, I’ve become much more interesting to people.”
“You were always interesting,” Mitch replied.
“Ho.” Morrie smiled. “You’re too kind.”
“Here’s the thing,” he said. “People see me as a bridge. I’m not alive as I used to be, but I’m not dead yet. I’m sort of in between.”
He coughed softly, then smiled once more.
“I’m on my last great journey here, and people want me to tell them what to pack.”
Personal reflection:
There is something deeply intriguing about the afterlife. It is perhaps mankind’s greatest mystery, one of the few questions humanity has chased for thousands of years without ever truly arriving at an answer. And in many ways, I believe this is what drew so many people toward Mereana in the final months of her life.
It was not only her authenticity, vulnerability, love, and extreme candidness that touched people so deeply. Nor was it solely her courage, bravery, and fearlessness in the face of suffering, although all of these carried immense weight. It was something deeper than that.
In a way, people may have seen her as a bridge. A bridge between life and whatever waits beyond it. She was on her last great journey here, unknowingly so, and people wanted to know what to pack. How to live. What truly mattered when everything superficial began to fall away. What love looked like when stripped to its purest form. And perhaps most importantly, how one continues to carry light, grace, and compassion, even while standing face to face with mortality itself.
Morrie then asked Mitch a few questions, which I found quite profound.
“Have you found someone to share your heart with?”
“Are you giving to your community?”
“Are you at peace with yourself?”
“Are you trying to be as human as you can be?”
Mitch Albom struggles to answer these questions, and once again, a quiet sense of shame begins to surface within him. Earlier in life, Mitch had promised himself that he would never work purely for money. He envisioned joining the Peace Corps, travelling the world, and living a life shaped by purpose, meaning, and inspiration. Yet somewhere along the way, life pulled him in the opposite direction.
Instead, he found himself confined within the same routine for over a decade. The same office in Detroit. The same house. The same walls. Like many people, he had become consumed by work, achievement, deadlines, and financial security, only to realise that the life he was living no longer resembled the life he once dreamed of.
For me personally, these are some of the most important questions a person can ask themselves. Questions capable of bringing clarity and perspective to people from all walks of life.
Tension of opposites
Lastly, Morrie introduces the idea of what he calls the “tension of opposites.”
“Have I told you about the tension of opposites?” he says.
“The tension of opposites?”
“Life is a series of pulls back and forth. You want to do one thing, but you are bound to something else. Something hurts you, yet you know you should not let it. You take certain things for granted, even though you know you should not take anything for granted. A tension of opposites, like a pull on a rubber band. And most of us live somewhere in the middle.”
“Sounds like a wrestling match,” Mitch replied.
“A wrestling match.” Morrie laughs. “Yes, you could describe life that way.”
“So which side wins?” I ask.
“Which side wins?”
He smiles at me with the crinkled eyes and crooked teeth.
“Love wins. Love always wins.”
In my humble opinion, this passage beautifully captures the duality of life itself. The balance between opposing forces. Yin and yang. Masculine and feminine. Light and darkness. For every night, a morning eventually follows. What rises must also fall. To every mountain peak there is also a valley below. To every warmth there exists the possibility of cold.
This duality appears woven into the very fabric of existence. Life constantly moves between opposing states, pulling us in different directions as we attempt to find balance somewhere in between. The “tension of opposites” that Morrie speaks of is not something to escape, but something to understand. A reminder that joy and suffering, love and grief, hope and fear, often coexist within the same human experience.
And perhaps that is why Morrie’s final conclusion carries so much weight.
Love wins. Love always wins.
First Tuesday - We talk about the world
On their first Tuesday, Morrie and Mitch talked about the world. Mitch noticed a stack of newspapers that had obviously been read before he arrived. Mitch asked, "Do you bother reading the news?"
Morrie replied, "Yes. Do you think that's strange? Do you think that because I'm dying, I shouldn't care what happens in this world?"
"Maybe," Mitch replied.
"Maybe you're right. After all, I'm not going to be around to see what happens after I die," Morrie replied. "But I'll tell you what, Mitch. Now that I'm suffering, I feel closer to people who are suffering than I ever did before. Seeing other people suffer makes me cry," he said. "But how can I put this simply, I'm also drawn to it." He then began to cry profusely.
"You ask why I cry for people I don't know, Mitch," said Morrie. "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, we think if we let it in we'll become too soft. But a wise man named Levine once said, 'Love is the only rational act.'"
Personal Reflection:
When I think of this passage, I think of how I've been since the passing of my wife. For some reason I've also been drawn to people who suffer in this world. My empathy has increased tenfold.
During her journey, we had also come to realise that love was the true source of all things. At the end of the day, the only thing that matters when all is said and done is love. I truly empathise with what Morrie is saying here.
Second Tuesday - We Talked About Feeling Sorry For Yourself
On the second Tuesday, they talk about feeling sorry for themselves. This is brought to life when Morrie opens up about how he mourns his own declining health and his failing body. Some mornings, Morrie cries. He grieves the loss of his ability to do the everyday things most of us never think twice about. But then he stops himself there. He refuses to allow himself any more self pity than that.
Mitch found himself thinking about the many people he knew who felt sorry for themselves, and they were perfectly healthy. Morrie then shares something that catches Mitch off guard. He says he feels almost lucky, in the sense that he has been given time to say goodbye to the people he loves. A lot of people never had that luxury.
How can he feel lucky, Mitch thinks to himself, when he is the one with the terminal illness?
Personal Reflection:
Following my wife's passing, I find myself noticing how often people complain. Complaining about an injury, complaining about having to do the washing, complaining about the small frictions of daily life. And if I am being honest, it frustrates me sometimes. There is a part of me that thinks, if only you knew.
This is not to discredit anyone's frustrations. We are all human, and life can wear on us in ways both big and small. But I do think that if people truly understood that right now, in hospitals all around the world, others are suffering in ways that are almost incomprehensible, they might hold their own burdens a little more lightly. They might look at the washing and be grateful their arms still work.
Third Tuesday - We Talk About Regrets
On this Tuesday, Mitch asked Morrie if he had any regrets.
It is what everyone worries about, isn't it? What if today were my last day on earth?
In response, Morrie said:
"The culture doesn't encourage you to think about such things until you're about to die. We're so wrapped up with egotistical things: career, family, having enough money, meeting the mortgage, getting a new car, fixing the radiator when it breaks. We're involved in trillions of little acts just to keep going. So we don't get into the habit of standing back and looking at our lives and saying, is this all? Is this all I want? Is something missing?"
When we get so caught up in all of these external things, all of these egoic pursuits we are convinced will bring us fulfilment, that is when we arrive at the end of our lives full of regret. Not because we didn't achieve enough, but because we never stopped long enough to ask ourselves whether we were chasing the right things to begin with.
Morrie encouraged Mitch to sit with some deeper questions. Do you take care of others, or do you take care of your inner child? Do you return to traditional values, or reject tradition as useless? Do you seek success, or seek simplicity? Do you just say no, or do you just do it?
In the coming weeks, Morrie told Mitch to ask him anything. Mitch, acutely aware that time was running short, decided he would be the best student he could possibly be. He would draw everything he could from Morrie's wisdom and lived experience, not just for himself, but for every other tortured soul in the world searching for the same clarity.
And so Mitch wrote a list of the things he wanted to understand most.
Death. Fear. Aging. Greed. Marriage. Family. Society. Forgiveness. A meaningful life.
Fourth Tuesday: We Talk About Death
The chapter opens with Morrie saying something that stops you in your tracks.
"Everyone knows they are going to die, but nobody believes it. If we did, we would do things differently."
But there is a better approach, he says. To know you are going to die, and to be prepared for it at any time, that is better. That way you can actually be more involved in your life while you are still living it. Do what the Buddhists do. Every day, have a little bird on your shoulder that asks, is today the day? Am I ready? Am I doing all I need to do? Am I being the person I want to be?
Morrie was a religious man, but in his final months on earth the things he was saying seemed to transcend all religious differences. Death has a way of doing that. It strips away the labels we hide behind and gets to the truth underneath.
"The truth is, Mitch," he said. "Once you learn how to die, you learn how to live."
Most people walk around as though they are sleepwalking, he continued. We don't truly experience the world, because we are half asleep, moving through life on autopilot, doing the things we automatically have to do without ever stopping to feel any of it.
And facing death changes all of that? Mitch asked.
"Oh yes. You strip away all that unnecessary noise and you focus on the essentials. When you realise you are going to die, you see everything much differently." He sighed, and said it once more, as if it were the most important thing he had ever spoken. "Learn how to die, and you learn how to live."
Morrie then turns his attention to the things we spend so much of our lives consumed by. Our ambitions. Our work. Our relentless pursuit of material things that ultimately leave us empty. He suggests that what society truly needs is more time devoted to spiritual practice, to the quiet and nourishing things. The loving relationships we have. The world around us. The things we take for granted every single day without realising it.
He then shares something simple and quietly profound. Each morning, he looks out of his window and notices the trees. He notices how strongly the wind is blowing, the way the light moves, the way the world carries on in its steady and unhurried rhythm. It is as though he can see time itself passing through that windowpane. Because he knows his time is almost done, he is drawn to nature in a way he never was before. It is like seeing the world for the very first time.
Personal Reflection:
Since the passing of Mereana, this has happened to me also.
Especially in that final month of her life in hospice, during our morning walks together. We were forced to slow down, and I mean truly, completely slow down. Life became simpler. Clearer. Everything I had once been so consumed by, the past, the future, the striving towards goals and the chasing of things, none of it mattered anymore. The only thing that mattered was the love between us. The love of her family. The love of her community. And the time we spent together, not distracted time, not half present time, but genuine and unhurried time, fully given to each other and to each moment.
In a way, once we knew that death was standing at our doorstep, we finally understood what it meant to truly live. To be truly alive. To appreciate every small detail, every quiet moment, every breath shared in the same space. Because in learning how to face death, we discovered, perhaps for the first time, how to truly love.
Fifth Tuesday: We talk about Family
On the fifth Tuesday they talked about family.
When Mitch asked Morrie about it, he simply smiled and gestured around the room. "You see mine, all around me." He nodded toward the photos on the bookshelves. Morrie as a child with his grandmother. Morrie as a young man with his brother David. Morrie with his wife Charlotte. Morrie with his two sons, Rob and Jon.
"I think in light of what we have been talking about these weeks, family becomes even more important," he said.
"The fact is there is no foundation, no secure ground, upon which people may stand today if it isn't family. It has become quite clear to me as I have been sick. If you don't have the support and love and caring and concern that you get from a family, you don't have much at all. Love is so supremely important. As the great poet Auden said, love each other or perish. A beautiful statement."
Without love, Morrie says, we are birds with broken wings. He admits that if he were divorced, without children, without family, facing this disease would be so much harder. And that is part of what family is truly about. Not just love, but the quiet and steady reassurance that there is someone watching out for you. That you are not facing this world alone.
Personal Reflection:
Laying by her side in those final weeks, this is a realisation that Mereana and I came to together. That love was the answer to everything. That it is the only thing truly left when all is said and done. The love of your partner. The love of your family. The love of your friends and your community, both near and far.
Take it from me. And if not from me, then take it from Morrie. A great man, a great human being, who lived a great life, and who arrived at the very same realisation when facing his own mortality.
Love each other or perish.
Sixth Tuesday: We Talk About Emotions
This chapter opens with Morrie's wife Charlotte telling Mitch that Morrie will be happy he is here. "He looks forward to your visits," she says. "He talks about having to do this project with you, how he has to concentrate and put time aside. I think it's giving him a good sense of purpose."
Personal Reflection:
This concept is echoed powerfully in Man's Search for Meaning, where Dr Viktor Frankl suggests that striving toward a goal, or pursuing a cause greater than oneself, gives an individual meaning. And through that meaning, it helps them persevere during times of suffering. Reading this opening passage, that is exactly what happened for Morrie. His project was to meet every Tuesday with Mitch and talk honestly about all of life's most important topics, so that it could be captured, recorded, and used to help others. By pursuing that cause, a cause greater than himself, Morrie found meaning. And that meaning gave him the energy and excitement to set time aside every Tuesday, to concentrate and show up fully, even as his body continued to fail him.
On this particular Tuesday, Morrie's lesson on emotions centred around the law of detachment. He says it is important not just for people who are dying, but for anyone who is alive. Learn to detach. The Buddhists say, don't cling to things, because everything is impermanent.
But this does not mean don't feel anything. He is clear on that. Let the emotion fully penetrate you. Experience it completely. And once you have felt it and acknowledged it, let it flush away.
"Take any emotion," he says. "Love for a woman, grief for a loved one, fear and pain from a deadly illness. If you hold back on the emotions, if you don't allow yourself to go through them, you can never get to being detached. You're too busy being afraid. Afraid of the pain. Afraid of the grief. Afraid of the vulnerability that love entails. But by throwing yourself into these emotions, by allowing yourself to dive in, all the way, over your head even, you experience them fully and completely. You know what pain is. You know what love is. And only then can you say, all right. I have experienced that emotion. I recognise that emotion. Now I need to detach from that emotion for a moment."
Morrie looks over and says quietly, "I know you think this is about dying. But it's like I keep telling you. When you learn how to die, you learn how to live."
And lastly, Morrie shares what he wants for himself at the end. He does not want to die in fear. He does not want to leave this world in a state of fright. He wants to know what is happening, accept it, find a peaceful place within it, and let go.
A beautiful finish to this chapter.
Personal Reflection:
There is something universal about that progression. Awareness. Acceptance. And then, finally, letting go.
As I close on this chapter I am drawn to a quote by the Buddha: "The root of all suffering is attachment."
Seventh Tuesday: We Talk About the Fear of Aging
Morrie opens this chapter by observing that most advertising in the modern era glorifies youth, and that almost everyone fears growing old. Everyone is running from it in some form.
He then touches on something quietly profound. Most people think of youth as something purely desirable, something visual and enviable. Yet Morrie points to just how miserable being young can actually be. Because you are still naive, still finding your footing, still without the life experience that brings genuine wisdom and peace. When he was healthy and teaching, his students would come to him carrying their struggles, their feelings of inadequacy, their sense that life was almost unbearable. The young, he says, are not yet wise. They have very little understanding of what life truly is.
Morrie encourages us to embrace aging, to see it not as a loss but as a natural and beautiful progression. People who spend their lives wishing they were younger are usually individuals who have not yet found fulfilment, still seeking happiness in something external, still searching for meaning they have not yet found. Because if you have truly found meaning in your life, you do not want to go back. You want to go forward. To see more. To do more. To become more.
Eighth Tuesday: We Talk About Money
Morrie had always been drawn to simple pleasures. Singing, laughing, dancing. Now more than ever, material things held little significance for him.
When you die, you always hear the expression, you can't take it with you. Yet Morrie saw something deeper at work in the world around him. A kind of collective brainwashing, he called it. The same message is repeated over and over until it becomes invisible, until it simply feels like truth. Owning things is good. More money is good. More property is good. More commercialism is good. More is good. More is good. We repeat it and it is repeated back to us, until the average person is so fogged up by all of it that they have lost all perspective on what is actually important.
You will always meet someone who constantly wants more. Morrie saw this not as ambition but as a symptom, people seeking substitutes for the love they are missing in their lives. And it never works, he said. You cannot fill that space with possessions. You cannot replace the warmth of human connection with property or status or things.
As he sat there slowly declining, he said: "When you most need it, neither money nor power will give you what you're looking for, no matter how much of them you have."
The truth is, he said, you don't get lasting satisfaction from any of those things. What really gives you satisfaction is offering others what you have to give. Not money. Your time. Your concern. Your presence. Your storytelling. That is how you earn genuine respect. That is the key to a meaningful life.
"Devote yourself to loving others, devote yourself to your community, and devote yourself to creating something that gives you purpose and meaning."
Personal Reflection:
Although this chapter is titled about money, what resonates with me most are the spiritual truths running beneath it.
As I sat with Mereana in hospice during her final weeks, she had accumulated over ten million Instagram visits, thousands of messages of love and support from around the world, and one hundred and fifty thousand dollars in her bank account from fundraising. And yet none of it gave her meaning. None of it was what she reached for in those quiet hours. All she cared about was the love between us, the love of her family, and the wider community she had inspired and who had inspired her in return. So Morrie's words carry incredible weight here. She lived them without ever having read them.
What also fascinates me is how the key to a meaningful life, across so many different voices and traditions, always seems to arrive at the same place. To live in service. To commit yourself to something greater than your own comfort or gain. I encountered this same truth in Man's Search for Meaning, where Dr Frankl writes that the key for success is to commit yourself to a cause greater than yourself, without clinging to the outcome. The parallels are striking and I do not think they are coincidental.
Perhaps that is part of why I started my charity, Toitū Ora, an organisation devoted to serving Māori youth across New Zealand. That is my cause greater than myself. That is my purpose. And it is one of the few things in my life that fills me with genuine and lasting fulfilment.
“Each night when I go to sleep, I die. And the next morning, when I wake up, I am reborn.” - Mahatma Gandhi
Ninth Tuesday: We Talk About How Love Goes On
By this Tuesday the leaves had begun to change colour. And Morrie's health was continuing to decline.
One of the first things Morrie touched on was how consumed we are as people by hurry. Always thinking about the next thing. Always somewhere else in our minds, even when we are physically present with someone. In conversation, he stressed the importance of being truly and fully there. Not just exchanging pleasantries or filling silence with small talk, but being genuinely interested in the person in front of you. Happy to sit with them. Attentive. Warm. Present with a real smile, not a polite one.
Learn to pay attention, he said. It is an art quietly and sadly lost in the world we live in today.
And then, as the visit drew toward its close, Morrie spoke about how love goes on.
It goes on through the way you treat people. Through the way you make them feel when they are in your presence. Through the memory of your voice, your warmth, your laughter, the particular way you had of making someone feel seen and valued. That is how your love continues beyond you. Not in monuments or achievements or the things you accumulated, but in the hearts of those who were special enough to know you.
That is how love goes on. And in that sense, it never truly ends.
Tenth Tuesday: We Talk About Marriage
Mitch hadn't wanted his wife to come to one of the Tuesday visits. But after a phone call where Morrie asked to speak to her directly, she decided she was coming to the next one. And so off together they came.
Upon arrival the usual proceedings took place, until Morrie asked if Mitch's wife, Janine, would sing for him. He had learned she was a professional singer. She agreed, and she began.
The very thought of you, and I forget to do, the little ordinary things that everyone ought to do.I see your face in every flower, your eyes in the stars above, it's just the thought of you, the very thought of you, my love.
It was a 1930s standard, written by Ray Noble. As I write this passage I am listening to the Billie Holiday version. I encourage you to do the same.
Then the conversation turned to marriage. Mitch observed that his generation does not believe in it the way previous ones did. He had been to a number of weddings, only to later see the same groom in a restaurant with a younger woman, or vice versa. Why is this, he asked Morrie.
"Well, I feel sorry for your generation," Morrie replied. Finding a loving relationship is one of the most important things a person can do. But he observed that young people today are either too selfish to commit to a real and loving relationship, or they rush headlong into marriage and six months later find themselves walking away from it. They don't know what they want in a partner, he said. And more importantly, they don't yet know who they are themselves. So how can they truly know who they are marrying?
Morrie had spent many years counselling unhappy couples, and the sadness of it never left him. Because a loving partner is so important, he said, especially when life gets hard. Friends are wonderful, but friends are not going to be there at two in the morning when you are coughing and cannot sleep and someone needs to sit up through the night with you, comfort you, and simply be there.
Morrie had been married to his wife Charlotte for forty four years. His keys to a loving and lasting marriage were these:
If you don't respect each other, you're going to have a lot of trouble.
If you don't know how to compromise, you're going to have a lot of trouble.
If you can't talk openly about what goes on between you, you're going to have a lot of trouble.
If you don't share a common set of values in life, you're going to have a lot of trouble. Your values must align.
And lastly, and most importantly, your belief in the importance of marriage itself must be unshakeable.
There is great wisdom in those words. I hope you as the reader find value in them. I know I certainly did.
Eleventh Tuesday: We Talk About Our Culture
By the eleventh Tuesday it was October, and it was jacket weather outside as the leaves clumped in piles outside on the lawns around West Newton. As Morrie’s health was declining and his body grew weaker by the day Mitch thought to himself how strange it is that we spend so much time trying to shape our bodies, lifting weights, crunching sit-ups, and in the end, nature takes it away. Either way Morrie believed in the inherent good in people, and he also saw what they could become.
“People are only mean when they’re threatened” Morrie says, and that's what our culture does. That's what our economy does. Even people who have jobs in our economy are threatened because they might lose their job, and when people are threatened they start looking out only for themselves. You start making money as a god. It is all part of our culture.
Instead of following the culture Morrie encourages Mitch to make his own sub-culture. Obviously, you can’t simply walk around in public naked, or run red lights at a traffic light. Those little things that our culture has, we must follow. But the big things - how we think, what we value - those you must choose for yourself. You can’t let anyone - or any society - determine those for you. Look no matter where you live, our biggest defect is human beings have is our shortsightedness. We should be stretching ourselves and looking at our potential.
The problem is that we don't believe we are as much alike as we are. Whites and blacks, Catholics and Protestants, men and women. If we saw each other as more alike, we might be very eager to join in one big human family in this world, and to care about that family the way we care about our own. “But believe me, when you are dying, you see it is true. We all have the same beginning - birth - and we all have the same end - death. So how different can we be ? Invest in the human family. Invest in people. Build a little community of those you love and who love you.
“In the beginning of life, when we are infants, we need others to survive, right ? And at the end of life when you get like me, you need others to survive, right? Morrie's voice dropped to a whisper. “But here's the secret: in between, we need others aswell”
A beautiful ending to this chapter. And a beautiful truth through wisdom.
Twelfth Tuesday: We Talk About Forgiveness
This chapter opens with a quote from Morrie. "Forgive yourself before you die. Then forgive others."
There is no point in carrying vengeance or stubbornness with you. "These things," he sighed, "these things I regret so deeply in my life. Pride. Vanity. Why do we do the things we do?"
He told Mitch a story about an old friend of his named Norman, a sculptor who had once made a figure of Morrie when he was younger. Long story short, Norman and his wife moved to Chicago and over time the two families lost contact. When Morrie's wife Charlotte was later hospitalised for a difficult operation, Norman and his wife knew about it and never reached out. Morrie and Charlotte were deeply hurt by that silence, and so they let the relationship go.
Over the years that followed, Morrie ran into Norman a few times, and each time Norman tried to reconcile. But Morrie never accepted it. He wasn't satisfied with the explanation he was given. He was prideful, and he shrugged him off.
Morrie's voice caught.
"Mitch, a few years ago, Norman died of cancer. I feel so sad. I never got to see him. I never got to forgive him. It pains me so much now."
And it isn't only others we must forgive, Morrie said. We must also forgive ourselves.
Ourselves? Mitch asked.
"Yes. Ourselves. For all the things we didn't do. All the things we should have done. You cannot get stuck on regrets of what should have happened. That doesn't help you when you get to where I am."
"I always wished I had done more with my work. I wished I had written more books. I used to beat myself up over it. Now I see that it never did any good. Make peace. You need to make peace with yourself and with everyone around you. Forgive yourself. Forgive others. Don't wait, Mitch. Not everyone gets the time I am getting. Not everyone is as lucky."
Personal Reflection:
I feel as though I carried a lot of this growing up, especially around external achievements. Whether it was being selected for a footy team or things at school, if I didn't get the outcome I wanted I would replay it endlessly, regretting choices, overthinking every detail.
But since Mereana's passing, I have a new appreciation for life and a much lighter relationship with the things I used to stress over. I have learned to forgive myself, and to forgive others for the ways they have wronged me. We are all human at the end of the day. Everyone is simply trying to figure things out as they go.
This has been especially true in relationships. I used to regret how certain situations unfolded, beating myself up over my own part in them while also quietly ruminating on what others had done to me. It created a kind of negative feedback loop that never added anything to my life, only weight.
As I have mentioned before, I have become more calm and more stoic in how I move through life now. I let things run their course. I let the flow of the universe unfold as it will.
Forgive others. Forgive yourself. Love each other or perish.
Thirteenth Tuesday: We Talk About The Perfect Day
By this point Morrie's body had grown fairly weak. A mere shell of his former self. A container of the soul, withering slowly to skin and bones.
"We are so afraid of the sight of death," he said. "But it's not contagious, you know. Death is as natural as life. It's part of the deal we made."
The night before, Morrie had endured a terrible spell of coughing that went on for hours, to the point where he genuinely believed this was it. He began to feel dizzy, and then something unexpected happened. He felt a certain peace settle over him. A readiness to let go. It was the most incredible feeling, he said. The sensation of accepting what was happening, fully and without resistance, and finding stillness inside of it.
"We make such a big deal of death because we don't see ourselves as part of nature. We think that because we are human, we are somehow above it. We are not. Everything that gets born, dies."
But there is something that sets us apart from plants and animals, he said. Our capacity to love. As long as we can love each other, and remember the feeling of love we had, we can die without ever really going away. All the love you created is still there. All the memories are still there. You live on in the hearts of everyone you have touched and nurtured while you were here.
"Death ends a life. Not a relationship."
Mitch then asked him something quietly profound. If he could wave a magic wand and make himself well again, would Morrie want to return to the man he once was?
"No way I could go back," he said. "I am a different self now. Different in my attitudes. Different in how I appreciate my body, which I never fully did before. Different in how I grapple with the big questions, the ultimate questions, the ones that matter and won't go away."
And which are those questions, Mitch asked.
"As I see it, they have to do with love, responsibility, spirituality, and awareness. And if I were healthy today, those would still be my questions. They should have been all along."
Personal Reflection:
As I sit with that last passage I cannot help but think about my own transformation, as a human being and as a man. I can never go back to who I was before Mereana. I have been changed to my core. My values, my internal world, the way I see life, all of it is different now. I suppose when you go through something as devastating as losing your wife to terminal cancer at twenty one years old, something deep within you shifts permanently.
And reflecting on who Mereana herself had become through that journey, had she survived, the person she was becoming was someone so profoundly different also. She had been stripped back to her purest self. And the biggest conclusion we arrived at together was that love is the source of all things. That through love, the answers to life can be found. Just as Morrie concluded that love, spirituality, awareness, and responsibility were the most important questions he had ever been drawn to, love was the most important conclusion we had come to as well. And through that love, my own awareness and spirituality deepened in ways I am still discovering.
Morrie's Perfect Day
When Mitch asked Morrie about his perfect day, what he would do if he could be healthy for just twenty four hours, Morrie smiled and said this:
"Let's see. I'd get up in the morning, do my exercises, have a lovely breakfast of sweet rolls and tea, go for a swim, then have my friends come over for a nice lunch. I'd have them come one or two at a time so we could really talk about their families, their lives, their issues, and about how much we mean to each other. Then I'd like to go for a walk in a garden with some trees, watch their colours, watch the birds, take in the nature I haven't been able to see in so long. In the evening we'd all go together to a restaurant with some great pasta, maybe some duck, and then we'd dance the rest of the night until I was exhausted. And then I'd go home and have a deep, wonderful sleep."
That's it? Mitch replied.
Yes. A simple and ordinary day.
Mitch had expected his perfect day to be travelling to Italy or Tuscany of some sort.
Mitch pondered: “How could a dying man find perfection in something so average”? And then Mitch understood. That was the whole point.
Personal Reflection:
In today's world people place enormous emphasis on lavish and materialistic experiences. And while yes, those things can be enjoyable, we so often and so deeply underestimate the simple pleasures. The quiet ones. The ones that ask nothing of us except to show up and be present.
Since Mereana's passing I have a completely new appreciation for the present moment. For nature. For beaches and forests and gardens and the way light moves through trees in the late afternoon. I believe these things can lift a person's spirit simply by being near them.
What does a dying man named Morrie and a grieving young man named Nui have in common? I believe that when faced with the full weight of human mortality, both of us arrived at the same quiet and simple truth.
Love. The present moment. Nature. Gratitude.
What else do you really need?
Fourteenth Tuesday: We Say Goodbye
By the fourteenth week, Morrie's health had declined to the point where he could no longer do very much at all. Everyone around him knew his time was drawing close. This final chapter speaks of a last encounter between Mitch and Morrie, where Mitch called him a good soul, and where the two men told each other, simply and without reservation, that they loved one another.
Graduation
Morrie died on a Saturday morning. His immediate family was with him in the house, sleeping in shifts around his bed. He had fallen into a coma two days after Mitch's final visit, and the doctor had said he could go at any moment. Instead he held on through a difficult afternoon and through a long, dark night. Finally, on the fourth of November, in the brief moment when those he loved had stepped out of the room, just to grab coffee from the kitchen, the first time none of them had been by his side since the coma began, Morrie stopped breathing.
And he was gone.
Mitch believes he died this way on purpose. That he wanted no haunting final moments, no one to witness his last breath and carry that image with them the way Morrie himself had been marked by loss in his own life, by a death-notice telegram for his mother and by the sight of his father's body in a city morgue. He was in his own bed. His books, his notes, and his small hibiscus plant were nearby. He wanted to go serenely. And that is how he went.
Personal Reflection:
In the last days of my late wife's life, she also slipped into a coma, and her family and I took turns to be by her side. What a sacred, sorrowful, and surreal experience that was. I will never forget it. I will never forget her. And despite the weight of that grief, I understand that the greatest way I can honour her is to lead with love and walk forward in gratitude.
More life.
Conclusion
In closing, Mitch reflects on what he would tell his younger self if he could go back to before rekindling his relationship with Morrie. He would tell himself to reach out sooner. But more than that, he would tell himself to be more open. To ignore the pull of advertised values. To pay attention when the people you love are speaking, as though it might be the last time you ever hear them.
Simple advice. But profound in the way that only the simplest things can be.
The last class of Mitch's 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.
Personal Conclusion
This is one of the most heartfelt and moving books I have ever read. I first encountered it in Year 9 at Matamata College, in an English class with Mrs Wiggins. We were asked to write an essay on it, and I received an Excellence. I have always had a natural inclination toward writing, and I have always been a deeply empathetic person, and I remember even then, at that age, how the universal ideas in this book spoke to something in me.
I am truly grateful to have found my way back to it, especially in the months following my wife's passing. It has brought me a clarity about what truly matters, and a sense of direction for the chapter of life that lies ahead.
As I write these final sentences I am listening to Cigarettes and Coffee by Otis Redding, an old soul classic, and it is making me feel quietly somber in the most beautiful way. It feels right somehow.
I want to close with a quote from Morrie, one that sits at the very heart of this book and, I think, at the very heart of what it means to be human.
"Love wins. Love always wins. We must love each other or perish."
Thank you for reading (:
