‘Tuesdays With Morrie’ A Gift To Humankind

“tuesdays With Morrie: An Old Man, A Young Man, and Life’s Greatest Lesson” By Mitch Albom (Doubleday, 192 pages, $19.95)

My world is mostly professional sports. It is peopled with large, muscular individuals in the relative bloom of health who are often arrogant if not downright obnoxious. Despite the frequent contentiousness of that world, I usually find myself more at home there than in the story of a dying man.

Until I read “tuesdays with Morrie.”

Briefly, this is the true story of a former student renewing his friendship with a favorite college professor as the man lies dying. The former student is Mitch Albom, a Detroit newspaperman whose sports columns are almost annually voted the best in the business. Ironically, Albom’s old mentor, Morrie Schwartz, suffers from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), also known as Lou Gehrig’s Disease because it killed the New York Yankees’ famous first baseman.

Albom sets out just to visit his old prof. He is a fast-laner, his newspaper’s No. 1 attraction, host of a daily radio show, a weekly guest on ESPN, author of big-selling books. Spending every Tuesday in Boston when you have that much to do in Detroit is not easy. But it becomes a labor of love in the most literal sense. Albom begins finding his visits mean more to him than they do to Morrie. Each Tuesday the two explore a new subject, ranging from family, to the fear of aging, to money, to marriage, to love.

Perhaps the most magnificent thing about this work is the grip Morrie keeps on his sense of humor even as he wastes away:

“Okay, question, I say to Morrie. His bony fingers hold his glasses across his chest, which rises and falls with each labored breath.

“‘What’s the question?’ Morrie says.

“Remember the Book of Job? … Job is a good man, but God makes him suffer. To test his faith.

“‘I remember,’ Morrie says.

“Takes away everything he has, his house, his money, his family, his health. So I’m wondering, what do you think about that?

“…’I think,’ he says, smiling, ‘God overdid it.”’ They really are talking about Morrie, not Job, but Morrie, though he can be droll, never surrenders to self-pity. And Albom, who came to his old teacher obsessed by achievement and its material rewards, finds himself learning more and more even as he loses more and more of Morrie.

My heart soared, and I wept. And repeated the process over and over. This book is a gift to humankind.