Tuesdays with Morrie: An Old Man, a Young Man, and Life's Greatest Lesson

Mon, 10 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Morrie Schwartz spent his last year pressing an argument most people arrange their lives to avoid: that you cannot work out how to live until you have looked straight at dying, and that a culture which hides death leaves you improvising your biggest decisions in the dark. He had reason to press it. In 1994 he was diagnosed with ALS, which kills the motor neurons that carry orders from brain to muscle until the body stops answering. Most people with it die of respiratory failure, and median survival from the first symptoms runs somewhere between two and four years. Patients stay awake and oriented throughout — thinking is affected more often than the popular picture allows, but Morrie’s was not — so they watch the whole thing happen. Morrie, a sociologist by trade, decided to teach from inside it.

Mitch Albom on SummaryShelf

Tuesdays with Morrie: An Old Man, a Young Man, and Life's Greatest Lesson