Tuesdays With Morrie Summary

Tuesdays with Morrie has no conventional numbered chapters. It is built from 27 short titled sections, most only two or three pages long, and the titles borrow the vocabulary of a university course because that is exactly how Morrie framed his own dying:

Setting up the class

• The Curriculum — the last class, in a house, with one student
• The Syllabus — Morrie's diagnosis in August 1994 and his decision to study his own death
• The Student — Albom at Brandeis, and the promise he did not keep
• The Audiovisual — the Nightline interviews with Ted Koppel
• The Orientation, The Classroom, Taking Attendance — the reunion, the study, and life as a tension of opposites

The fourteen Tuesdays

• The First Tuesday — We Talk About the World
• The Second Tuesday — We Talk About Feeling Sorry for Yourself
• The Third Tuesday — We Talk About Regrets
• The Fourth Tuesday — We Talk About Death
• The Fifth Tuesday — We Talk About Family
• The Sixth Tuesday — We Talk About Emotions
• The Seventh Tuesday — We Talk About the Fear of Aging
• The Eighth Tuesday — We Talk About Money
• The Ninth Tuesday — We Talk About How Love Goes On
• The Tenth Tuesday — We Talk About Marriage
• The Eleventh Tuesday — We Talk About Our Culture
• The Twelfth Tuesday — We Talk About Forgiveness
• The Thirteenth Tuesday — We Talk About the Perfect Day
• The Fourteenth Tuesday — We Say Good-bye

Interleaved between the Tuesdays

• The Audiovisual, Part Two and Part Three — the second and third Nightline broadcasts
• The Professor and The Professor, Part Two — Morrie's own childhood and career
• Graduation and Conclusion — the death, the funeral, and what Albom takes from it

In the printed book the Tuesday headings sit on two lines with no punctuation; library catalogues add the colon.

This Tuesdays with Morrie summary begins with a broken promise. Mitch Albom graduated from Brandeis in 1979, handed his favourite professor a monogrammed briefcase, and said he would stay in touch. The book records what happened next in four words: he did not keep in touch. Sixteen years went by. Albom failed at a music career in New York, watched a beloved uncle die of pancreatic cancer at forty-four, and responded by working relentlessly — a master's at Columbia, then a job in Detroit that made him one of the most decorated sports columnists in the country.

Meanwhile Morrie Schwartz, a lifelong and enthusiastic dancer, noticed that he could no longer dance. On a humid day in August 1994 a neurologist told him and his wife Charlotte that he had amyotrophic lateral sclerosis — ALS, Lou Gehrig's disease. There was no cure. He was seventy-seven. Rather than withdraw, Morrie decided to make his own death the last thing he studied, and began writing short maxims on yellow pads and scraps of paper about what dying was teaching him.

Those scraps are why the book exists. A Brandeis colleague sent them to the Boston Globe, which published a feature in March 1995 headlined "A Professor's Final Course: His Own Death." A Nightline producer read it, and Ted Koppel came to the house. Albom, watching in Detroit, recognised his professor on television and picked up the phone.

Their reunion is the most quietly damning scene in the book. Albom pulls up outside the house in West Newton, Massachusetts, sees Morrie waiting in the driveway in his wheelchair, and stays in the car to finish a call with a television producer. He later writes that he cannot explain why Morrie received him so warmly, and that without Nightline his professor might have died without ever seeing him again.

What turns one visit into fourteen is an accident of labour relations. The unions at Albom's newspaper went on strike, the paper shut down, and for the first time in his adult life he had no job to go to and no column to file. So he flew in every Tuesday, always carrying food Morrie could increasingly not eat, and switched on a tape recorder.

The visits work through a syllabus. They talk about the world, about self-pity, about regret, about death, family, emotions, ageing, money, how love goes on, marriage, the culture, forgiveness, and finally about what a perfect day would look like. Morrie's teaching is consistent and unsentimental. He allows himself a fixed period of grief every morning and then stops. He argues that you cannot detach from a feeling you have refused to feel, so you have to go all the way into it first. He rejects the terror of ageing on the grounds that envying the young is envying ignorance, and that he contains every age he has ever been. He is sharpest on the culture: commercialism as brainwashing by repetition, people gobbling up possessions because they are starving for love and taking substitutes.

Running underneath is Morrie's own story, told in the two sections called The Professor. A mother who died when he was eight, whose death he learned about from a telegram he had to read aloud himself because he was the only one in the house who read English. A father who never once tucked him in and forbade him to speak of her. A stepmother, Eva, who sang to the children and demanded they learn, and whom Albom credits with hatching Morrie's love of teaching.

And there is a second, smaller story: Albom's estranged younger brother Peter, living in Spain, ill with the same rare pancreatic cancer that had killed their uncle, refusing all help and all contact. Morrie keeps pushing Mitch to reach out.

The decline is tracked without euphemism. Cane, then walker, then wheelchair. Then he cannot lift his arms above his chest, cannot dress or wash or use the bathroom alone, cannot chew. Food becomes puree and then baby food. His back has to be pounded to clear his lungs. He coins a new aphorism for himself along the way — when you're in bed, you're dead — and insists on being lifted into his study chair every single morning.

Somewhere in the middle of it he holds a living funeral. A colleague had died suddenly and Morrie came home depressed at all the beautiful things said over a man who could not hear them, so he gathered friends and family one cold Sunday and had them pay their tributes to his face. He cried and laughed with them, and Albom notes that everything people usually save for too late got said that afternoon.

The Fourteenth Tuesday is the shortest of them. Charlotte telephones the day before to warn Mitch that Morrie is not doing well. He arrives on a cold, damp morning, finds the study empty, and turns toward the bedroom, with his professor's own aphorism starting up in his head — when you're in bed, you're dead. Morrie is in bed, on morphine, with a hospice nurse in the hallway, and Albom describes him as being as small as a child. They say goodbye, and Mitch cries in front of him for the first time in the book. He promises to come back next Tuesday.

Two days later Morrie slipped into a coma. He died on Saturday 4 November 1995, at seventy-eight, roughly fourteen months after the diagnosis. The book is precise about the moment: everyone who loved him had stepped out of the room for the first time since the coma began, gone to get coffee in the kitchen, and that is when he stopped breathing. Albom believes he chose it that way, so that nobody would have to watch — a man who had learned of his mother's death from a telegram and identified his father's body in a city morgue did not want anyone else carrying that image.

The funeral was small, at Charlotte's insistence, on a windy morning by a pond, with a rabbi Morrie had chosen himself reading poems and his brother David throwing the first earth into the grave. At the graveside Mitch began, silently, the conversation Morrie had asked for weeks earlier when he showed him the spot he had picked out. Morrie's instruction had been simple: come and talk, make it a Tuesday, and after I'm dead you talk and I'll listen. Standing there, Albom realises what day of the week it is. It was Tuesday.

The book closes with a direct question to the reader — have you ever really had a teacher? — and then loops back to its own first paragraph, the class that met on Tuesdays by a window in a study, where no books were required and the subject was the meaning of life. The last line is that the teaching goes on.

One fact worth knowing about the ending is that the book was Morrie's idea, not Mitch's. He called it their final thesis. Albom writes that the advance helped pay Morrie's very large medical bills — large in part because he had chosen to die at home rather than in a hospital — and that both of them were grateful for it. Publisher after publisher turned the proposal down as too much of a downer before Doubleday took it.

The lines from Tuesdays with Morrie by Mitch Albom that readers copy out most often, quoted verbatim and almost all spoken by Morrie:

"Death ends a life, not a relationship."

"The truth is, Mitch, once you learn how to die, you learn how to live."

"The most important thing in life is to learn how to give out love, and to let it come in."

"When you're in bed, you're dead."

"Don't let go too soon, but don't hang on too long."

"Love each other or perish."

The first is the last sentence Morrie manages before Albom switches off the tape recorder on the Thirteenth Tuesday. The second he says twice in a row, deliberately, to make sure it lands. The last one comes with a footnote worth knowing: Morrie attributes it to W. H. Auden, but Auden never wrote it — his line, from "September 1, 1939", is "We must love one another or die", and he later disowned even that. Morrie also uses a second version of his own, "love each other or die", elsewhere in the book.