Dying in Character: Memoirs on the End of Life

9. “Learn How to Live, and You’ll Know How to Die”: Morrie Schwartz’s Letting Go and Mitch Albom’s Tuesdays with Morrie

= 225 < chapter 9 “Learn How to Live, and You’ll Know How to Die” Morrie Schwartz’s Letting Go and Mitch Albom’s Tuesdays with Morrie = N early everyone has heard of Tuesdays with Morrie, Mitch Albom’s best-selling memoir about his relationship with his former Brandeis University sociology professor Morrie Schwartz, who succumbed to amyotrophic lateral sclerosis on November 4, 1995, a month short of his seventy-ninth birthday. Few people know, however, that a year before Albom published his book, Schwartz published his own end-of-life memoir, Letting Go, in which he offers his reflections on “living while dying.” Curiously, Tuesdays with Morrie never refers to Letting Go, which offers a fascinating insight into Schwartz’s life. Nor does Schwartz, who writes about reestablishing ties with people he had been out of touch with for years, “including former students who contacted me after hearing that I was ill” (Letting Go 70), mention Albom in Letting Go. The two memoirs complement and complicate each other. A Research Sociologist Long before he became known to millions of readers as Morrie, he was Morris S. Schwartz, the coauthor of three scholarly books on mental illness . Before developing ALS, Schwartz never wrote about death and dying, but much of what he wrote about mental illness helps us to understand his final years as a patient. After receiving his PhD in sociology 226 = “Learn How to Live, and You’ll Know How to Die” < from the University of Chicago in the 1950s, Schwartz worked for five years at Chestnut Lodge, a psychiatric institution in Rockville, Maryland . The experience influenced his later research and teaching. In his first book, The Mental Hospital, coauthored with psychiatrist Alfred H. Stanton, Schwartz writes from the point of view of participantobserver , which subverts the position that “‘the doctor knows best,’ or that the sociologist, being free for scientific inquiry, ‘knows best’” (435). Many of the authors’ observations about mental patients have uncanny relevance to dying patients, including the recognition that they see the world as “unreal,” live with the feeling “of restraint and being closed in, or suffocated,” and experience “utter, desperate, and unrelieved loneliness , with no hope of change” (169). Stanton and Schwartz’s empathy is striking, along with their knowledge that those who are ill or dying need to remain connected with others. Attachment theory, formulated by John Bowlby in his three-volume work Attachment and Loss, is central to Stanton and Schwartz’s vision of psychiatry and sociology, respectively. Throughout The Mental Hospital they champion the value of human connectedness . Alienation, isolation, and stigmatization are as problematic for the dying patient as for the mentally ill patient. “To be a mental patient”—or a dying patient—“means to feel removed from the human race and to view oneself as not quite human” (169). Schwartz’s next book, The Nurse and the Mental Patient, coauthored with Emmy Lanning Shockley, a psychiatric nurse and former director of nursing education at Chestnut Lodge, explores the problem of “withdrawn ” patients. The coauthors make a valuable distinction between solitude and withdrawal. “In solitude one takes time out to be alone, to think, to contemplate events that have occurred, or to become reacquainted with oneself and the changes that have happened in one’s life. One temporarily removes oneself from relations with others. But in a withdrawn state the patient is constantly by himself and away from others. Only rarely does he associate with anyone on his own initiative” (91). The distinction between solitude and withdrawal is important not only for the mental patient but also for the dying patient. Solitude may be considered a preparation for dying, therefore, necessary, whereas withdrawal makes dying more difficult. Morris Schwartz’s final coauthored book, Social Approaches to Mental Patient Care, written with his wife, Charlotte Green Schwartz, discusses = Schwartz’s Letting Go and Albom’s Tuesdays with Morrie < 227 the “ancillary therapies” found in most mental hospitals, including occupational therapy, music therapy, recreational therapy, and bibliotherapy. The objective of these therapies is to allow patients to express themselves. These activities encourage patients to “discover unknown talents and desires and to develop deep and continuing interests in creative work” (123). The authors make several recommendations at the end of the book, including a revision of the role of the mental patient. “Genuine respect for the patient and for the dignity of his person, some privacy in living arrangements, and opportunities for the cultivation of self-esteem must be built into his role” (300). A Participant-Observer of His Own Illness Schwartz’s extensive experience as a participant-observer serves him well when, dying of ALS, he pens his only single-author book, Letting Go. “When you’re ill, you need to learn to be both a participant and an observer in whatever is happening to you. In my own case, I had developed this capacity over several years when I was a researcher at Chestnut Lodge Sanatorium, where I observed and analyzed patient-staff interactions for a project on mental illness” (Letting Go 99). Being a participantobserver enables him to write about himself with detachment, “watching what was happening, even though the events themselves were very, very moving emotionally. There came a time when I could almost simultaneously look at what was going on while I was experiencing it” (99). Letting Go is written in a simple style that is never simplistic, pedantic, or condescending. One can fault Schwartz for his overuse of qualifiers like very and clichés like the plague, but it’s unlikely he had the time or energy to revise the dictated chapters. The tone of Letting Go is upbeat and inspirational without being overly platitudinous. Throughout the book Schwartz speaks like a teacher, but he realizes that no one is an expert on death and dying. His humility is reflected in his self-effacing humor. “I’ve never been a very brave person in terms of dealing with physical pain. If I were in a torture chamber and my inquisitors wanted a confession, I probably would confess fast” (107). Some of his statements in Letting Go are obvious and unnecessary, such as, “get as much help as you can when you need it” (10). Other recommendations are easier to accept in theory than in practice: “Be hopeful but not foolishly hopeful” (106). And other statements contain 228 = “Learn How to Live, and You’ll Know How to Die” < understated irony: “Entertain the thought and feeling that the distance between life and death may not be as great as you think” (119). Unlike other end-of-life memoirs such as Harold Brodkey’s This Wild Darkness, Edward Said’s Out of Place, Tony Judt’s The Memory Chalet, and Art Buchwald’s Too Soon to Say Goodbye, Letting Go describes in wrenching detail the relentless deterioration of the body. This is one of the memoir ’s strengths. Schwartz captures in a few pages the cruelty of the fatal, degenerative disease in which the mind remains alert as the body massively fails. Upon learning in 1994 that he has ALS, he asks himself, “Am I going to die, or am I going to live?” (3). He never doubts that he will soon succumb to the disease, but he vows not to withdraw from life, as many people in his situation would do. Remaining alive means observing the inexorable progression of the disease. He describes his difficulty swallowing and anticipates the loss of speech, remarking that people will need to “frame much of what they are saying as questions that I can answer in a yes-or-no code. That’s the way I am approaching the coming loss of speech” (6). He urges those in his situation not to remain preoccupied with either their body or their illness. “Recognize that your body is not your total self, only part of it” (13). Any disease, especially one like ALS, can rob patients of their dignity, but it is possible to create what Harvey Max Chochinov, a psychiatrist at the University of Manitoba, calls a model of “dignity-conserving” palliative care. Continuity of self refers to a sense that the essence of who one is remains intact, in spite of an advancing illness. Role preservation is the ability of patients to function or remain invested in their usual roles, as a way of maintaining congruence with a prior view of themselves. Maintenance of pride is the ability to maintain a positive sense of self-regard or self-respect. Hopefulness is seeing life as enduring , or as having sustained meaning or purpose. Autonomy/control is the ability to maintain a sense of control over one’s life circumstances . Generativity/legacy is the solace or comfort of knowing that something of one’s life will transcend death. Acceptance is an ability to accommodate to changing life circumstances. Finally, resiliency/ fighting spirit is the mental determination exercised in an attempt to overcome illness or to optimize quality of life. (2256) = Schwartz’s Letting Go and Albom’s Tuesdays with Morrie < 229 Significantly, all eight subthemes discussed by Chochinov appear in Letting Go. Schwartz never wavers in his continuity of self, and he clearly relishes his role as teacher and mentor. So, too, does his pride remain intact. His hopefulness arises not from his belief in a miraculous cure but from the conviction that his life has had enduring meaning and purpose. He demonstrates autonomy/control first by writing and then, when that is no longer possible, by dictating his book. His generativity/legacy is evident on every page of Letting Go. His acceptance of death coexists with his resiliency/fighting spirit as he continues to battle with life even as he prepares to let go. Without deceiving himself about the challenges that await him, Schwartz interprets some of his losses as gains. He recognizes that he will soon lose the power of speech, but he knows he will be able to “take advantage of silence, because maybe that’s the way to really hear yourself” (Letting Go 5). Anticipating the worst helps him, paradoxically, adapt to his deteriorating health. “Whatever powers you find yourself losing, be it walking or talking or being as mentally sharp as before, the more you can anticipate their impact, the easier your adjustment will be” (7). ALS may have shattered his assumptive world during the beginning of his illness, but he retains his belief in the goals that he has pursued since childhood: “to behave with courage, dignity, generosity, humor, love, openheartedness , patience, and self-respect” (12). Schwartz’s advice to his readers in Letting Go is consistent with the observations he makes in his three coauthored psychiatric books. The bedrock of his philosophy lies in the open expression of emotions, especially dark emotions: frustration, anger, bitterness, resentment, and shame. He has an abiding belief in the talking cure. He advocates talking honestly with those who will listen, and, when necessary, speaking with a therapist, particularly if one suffers from depression. He remains realistic about the value of speaking about one’s illness. “The catharsis or relief you get doesn’t mean your grief is all over and has been resolved or that crying has taken care of the situation. Rather, for the moment you come to some stasis, some sense of rest” (36). Abounding in philosophical and psychological insights, Letting Go reads like a contemporary version of the ars moriendi, the art of dying, a tradition that emerged in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. A secular ars moriendi, Letting Go provides useful advice for the dying and their caregivers: how to manage 230 = “Learn How to Live, and You’ll Know How to Die” < physical and psychological pain, how to accept the inevitability of death, how to cope with stressful situations, how to grieve, and how to achieve inner peace. Schwartz is not afraid to mention that he cries—often. “I let the tears flow until they dry up. And then I start to think about what I’m crying about. I’m crying about my own death, my departure from people I love, the sense of unfinished business and of leaving this beautiful world. Crying has helped me gradually come to accept the end—the fact that all living things die” (Letting Go 30). His revelation is counter to the cultural bias that men should not cry. In Men Don’t Cry . . .Women Do,Terry Martin and Kenneth Doka describe three distinct patterns of grief: intuitive, instrumental, and blended. Intuitive grievers convert their energy into the affective domain, while instrumental grievers convert their energy into the cognitive domain. Those with a blended pattern, which constitutes the majority of grievers, reflect a balance or symmetry in their affective and cognitive responses (32). Based on these classification, Schwartz lies midway between being an intuitive and blended griever. Without privileging the affective over the cognitive, he knows that terminal illness poses greater challenges to our emotional understanding rather than to our intellectual understanding. Schwartz affirms the writing cure as well as the talking cure. After he became ill, he started to write “aphorisms for my own benefit” (Letting Go 66). Soon he shared his writings with family and friends, and then the aphorisms became the basis for an interview published in the Boston Globe. Few of these aphorisms are memorable or witty—Schwartz never rises to the level of the masters of the aphoristic genre, such as Michel de Montaigne, Blaise Pascal, Francois de La Rochefoucauld, Friedrich Nietzsche, Mark Twain, or Oscar Wilde—but collectively the aphorisms cast much light on love and loss, dying and death. Schwartz mentions several writers in Letting Go, and it is instructive to see what he learns from each one. He acknowledges that George H. Mead’s Mind, Self, and Society influenced him in graduate school. He singles out Mead’s early emphasis on “taking the role of the other.” Mead doesn’t use the word empathy to describe taking the role of the other, but he implies this—and empathy is a key word throughout Schwartz’s writings . Schwartz refers briefly to Martin Buber’s I and Thou, published in German in 1923 and translated into English in 1937. Schwartz interprets = Schwartz’s Letting Go and Albom’s Tuesdays with Morrie < 231 the I-Thou relationship to mean that self and other are reciprocally related without a loss of individuality. Schwartz paraphrases Auden’s celebrated line in his poem “September 1, 1939,” “Love each other or die” (Letting Go 122), though he doesn’t note, as David Rieff does in Swimming in a Sea of Death, that Auden changed the line to read “We must love one another and die.” Schwartz also refers to Alexander Bowen’s “useful” book The Betrayal of the Body. “His idea is that we think our body should be perfect or at least should be functioning at a high level all the time. When it does not, we feel betrayed by it as if there’s some ordained commandment that we always will be healthy and our body always will be responsive” (Letting Go 7–8). Elizabeth Kübler-Ross’s Influence Curiously, Schwartz does not cite the book that most influenced his thinking : Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s On Death and Dying. Most of his insights echo her statements. The subtitle of Letting Go—Morrie’s Reflections on Living while Dying—reminds us of Kübler-Ross’s observation in Death Is of Vital Importance that she is not the “death and dying lady” but the “life and living lady” (137). His emphasis on ventilation recalls her similar statements in On Death and Dying. Both writers urge the dying to express all of their emotions, positive and negative, and they encourage family and friends to listen patiently and empathically, without offering false hope or consolation. Additionally, they both argue that grieving, mourning, and crying are natural processes that help one to prepare for death. Like Kübler-Ross, Schwartz urges patients suffering from “reactive depression” to enter psychotherapy. Like her, he implicitly accepts Freud’s theory of decathexis, of “letting go,” though he affirms a relational vision where the dying remain connected to the living. Perhaps most important of all, Schwartz knows, like Kübler-Ross, that the dying person experiences different and, often simultaneously, contradictory emotions. He does not refer to the stage theory of dying, but he writes about denial, anger, depression, and acceptance. He admits that he went “in and out of acceptance” shortly after learning he had ALS. There are other similarities, including Schwartz’s emphasis on “life review,” the exact term Kübler-Ross uses to describe how the deceased should reflect on their lives. Forgiveness lies at the heart of their writings. 232 = “Learn How to Live, and You’ll Know How to Die” < Both Schwartz and Kübler-Ross are inspirational writers, conveying courage, strength, hope, humor, and dignity. And both affirm teaching and learning from the other. “They tell me they are learning from me,” he observes in Letting Go, sounding like Kübler-Ross, “that watching me is an inspiration to them. And in return I feel that they’re continuing to keep me alive because there’s so much energy and good feeling, love, concern, and care that comes from these friends, as well as from my family . Since I’m so restricted in my movements, they bring the world in” (83). Schwartz’s concluding exhortation in Letting Go—“Learn how to live, and you’ll know how to die; learn how to die and you’ll know how to live” (125)—could appear in any of Kübler-Ross’s books. If Kübler-Ross’s spirit hovers over Letting Go, why, then, does Schwartz fail to express his indebtedness to her? It’s unlikely that he experienced what Harold Bloom calls the “anxiety of influence,” the belief that “precursor ” writers intimidate living ones. It’s more likely that Schwartz fails to mention Kübler-Ross because of his skepticism of her later ideas: her out-of-body experiences, her mysticism and occultism, her belief in reincarnation and communion with the dead, her conversations with Jesus, and her assertion that death is a wonderful and positive experience. The secular Schwartz was concerned with this life, not the next one, and nowhere do we see in Letting Go, as we do in The Wheel of Life, the desire to be on the “other side.” And yet, paradoxically, Schwartz acknowledges near the end of Letting Go his evolving spirituality. In the penultimate chapter, “Developing a Spiritual Connection,” he discloses his early rejection of his father’s Orthodox Jewish faith, his gradual dissatisfaction with his own agnosticism , his growing interest in Eastern meditation, and his ongoing search for spiritual truth. “The fact that you’re seeking means you’ve already established a spiritual connection” (116). In his view, people are spiritual not because of the answers they reach but because of the questions they raise. In the last chapter, “Considering Death,” Schwartz recounts an allegory , told to him by his meditation teacher, about a male wave who is terrified about crashing into the shore and being annihilated. A female wave responds, reassuringly, “You don’t understand. You’re not a wave; you’re part of the ocean” (127). Schwartz ends with the assertion that though he will soon die, he will continue to live on. “In some other form? Who knows? But I believe that I am part of a larger whole” (127). = Schwartz’s Letting Go and Albom’s Tuesdays with Morrie < 233 There are few regrets in Letting Go, apart from those events over which Schwartz had no control, such as the death of his mother when he was eight years old. The loss left him bereft his entire life. The experience “sensitized Morrie to loss and his need for other people,” observes a former student, Paul Solman, in the introduction to Letting Go (xi). Maternal loss was the shaping event in Schwartz’s life, as it was in Brodkey’s and Buchwald’s lives, influencing not only their choice of career but also their interest in mourning and bereavement. According to Solman, Schwartz stated that “Greenhouse,” the low-fee psychotherapy organization he created in the 1960s, arose from his ability “to mourn loss, starting with his mother and ending with himself” (xv). Letting Go is a personal account of Schwartz’s battle with terminal illness , and in it he reveals his grief over his mother’s death and his anger toward his father who refused to allow him to grieve. The book reveals nothing, however, about how his illness has affected his wife and two children. To this extent it resembles The Wheel of Life, Out of Place, The Memory Chalet, and Too Soon to Say Goodbye. Schwartz is also uncomfortable with his loss of privacy. “When you’re sick, privacy becomes a valuable commodity because it’s very hard to come by. As I get more and more dysfunctional, I have to suffer more invasion of my privacy” (91). The Astonishing Popularity of Tuesdays with Morrie This invasion of privacy for Schwartz and his family was nothing, however , compared to the publicity they received following the publication of Mitch Albom’s Tuesdays with Morrie. The book soon reached the “number one” position on the New York Times bestseller list, where it remained for 205 weeks. Tuesdays with Morrie is one of the best-selling memoirs of all time, selling over 14 million copies. Translated into 41 languages, it was made into a television movie, produced by Oprah Winfrey and starring Jack Lemmon (in his last credited role) as Morrie and Hank Azaria as Mitch Albom. Tuesdays with Morrie was the most-watched TV movie of 1999 and won four Emmy Awards. The book is now taught in high schools and colleges throughout the world. Albom, a professional sports columnist for the Detroit Free Press, had lost contact with his professor after graduation. Seeing the dying Schwartz interviewed by Ted Koppel on the ABC television program Nightline, 234 = “Learn How to Live, and You’ll Know How to Die” < Albom decided to reconnect with him. Experiencing an early midlife crisis, Albom felt emotionally drawn to Schwartz, who quickly became a father figure to him. Albom flew to Massachusetts every week—on Tuesdays—to interview his former mentor, who lived in West Newton, a quiet suburb of Boston. A slim memoir that can be read in a few hours, Tuesdays with Morrie explores Schwartz’s reflections on death, dying, and the meaning of life. The reflections prove transformative to his former student, who quickly becomes his teacher’s disciple. Albom’s Acknowledged and Unacknowledged Indebtedness to Schwartz The “Morrie” who appears in Letting Go is similar to the eponymous figure who reflects upon death in Albom’s memoir. Most of Schwartz’s observations in Tuesdays with Morrie echo those he makes in Letting Go, beginning with his statement to Ted Koppel, “when all this started, I asked myself, ‘Am I going to withdraw from the world, like most people do, or am I going to live?’ I decided I’m going to live—or at least try to live—the way I want, with dignity, with courage, with humor, with composure” (Tuesdays with Morrie 21). As in Letting Go, he emphasizes the importance of emotional self-expression, including crying. In both memoirs he affirms the need to remain connected with others, and he reaches out to a larger audience who may be interested in his story. The allegory of the wave appears in both Letting Go and Tuesdays with Morrie, along with the theme of (self-)forgiveness. Acceptance of death is central to both Letting Go and Tuesdays with Morrie. After stating, “once you learn how to die, you learn how to live” (82), Schwartz repeats the sentence, word for word, three times. As in Letting Go, his most essential advice in Tuesdays with Morrie is the need to love and be loved—and he then cites the same line from Auden’s poem. There are also differences between the two Morries. He’s blunter and funnier in Albom’s story. “Mitch, you are one of the good ones ” (4), he tells his student, who has presented him with a briefcase with his initials on the front, immediately after graduation. It’s an odd remark, implying that not all of Schwartz’s students were good. Albom cites one of Schwartz’s wry aphorisms that does not appear in Letting Go: “When you’re in bed, you’re dead” (131). Schwartz’s abrasive side is evident in Albom’s story. When Ted Koppel asks him for his impressions of Nightline, Schwartz = Schwartz’s Letting Go and Albom’s Tuesdays with Morrie < 235 pauses, then admits that he thought Koppel was a “narcissist” (21). He’s also earthier, admitting to Koppel and Albom his fear that soon “someone ’s gonna have to wipe my ass” (22). Albom expresses his gratitude to Schwartz for his help, but he never cites Letting Go, the precursor to Tuesdays with Morrie. Why the omission ? Did Albom fear that Schwartz’s self-characterization in Letting Go would lessen the originality of Tuesdays with Morrie? Was he apprehensive that Schwarz’s reflections in Letting Go on “living while dying” might eliminate or diminish the need for his own story about “an old man, a young man, and life’s greatest lesson”? Throughout Tuesdays with Morrie Albom focuses on the student-teacher relationship, yet the student seems remiss in documenting his reliance on his teacher’s own book on death and dying. Not that Tuesdays with Morrie fails to offer us new information about Schwartz. We learn that shortly after his diagnosis, Schwartz “hobbled” into the classroom to teach his final course. “My friends, I assume you are all here for the Social Psychology class. I have been teaching this course for twenty years, and this is the first time I can say there is a risk in taking it, because I have a fatal illness. I may not live to finish the semester” (9). I admire Schwartz’s openness, his willingness to make risky self-disclosures. Death becomes his final research project, and he shares his conclusions with his students. I’m sympathetic to his decision to make death education a part of his college curriculum, but I wish that he had told us his students’ reactions to their dying professor. Was he as life-affirming in the course as he is in Letting Go? Did anyone drop the course? Albom never discusses these questions though he quotes Henry Adams’s observation that “a teacher affects eternity; he can never tell where his influence stops” (79). “Our Final Thesis” Tuesdays with Morrie raises another question. “I always wished I had done more with my work,” Schwartz confesses to Albom toward the end of Tuesdays with Morrie. “I wished I had written more books. I used to beat myself up over it. Now I see that never did any good” (166–67). We never learn what those books might have been about or why he failed to write them. His three coauthored books were written early in his career. Published in a ten-year period and totaling more than eleven hundred pages in print, The 236 = “Learn How to Live, and You’ll Know How to Die” < Mental Hospital, The Nurse and the Mental Patient, and Social Approaches to Mental Patient Care reveal that he was a prolific and speedy writer, bursting with ideas. The last of these books appeared in 1964, thirty years before he became ill. The publication gap is mystifying. Did Schwartz feel that he had nothing more to say after 1964? Did he lose the self-discipline that is essential for scholarship? Albom reveals in the conclusion to Tuesdays with Morrie that the book was “largely Morrie’s idea. He called it our ‘final thesis ’” (191). If the book genuinely was a collaborative effort, did they consider the possibility of coauthorship? Nowhere in Letting Go or Tuesdays with Morrie does Schwartz express a desire for literary fame or immortality. Nevertheless, he wanted his story to be told, and by encouraging Albom to write about their time together, he affirms the need for a posterity self— though neither teacher nor student could imagine the astounding popularity of the end-of-life memoir. Tuesdays with Morrie is a highly readable “thesis,” but there are several gaps and omissions in it. We learn little about Schwartz’s forty-four-year marriage. Albom refers occasionally to Charlotte Schwartz, always positively , but in both Letting Go and Tuesdays with Morrie Schwartz’s wife is off-limits for discussion. Albom admits, in a candid passage, “Charlotte was a private person, different from Morrie, but I knew how much he respected her, because sometimes when we spoke, he would say, ‘Charlotte might be uncomfortable with me revealing that,’ and he would end the conversation. It was the only time Morrie held anything back” (148– 49). The silence piques the reader’s interest. How did Charlotte Schwartz, her husband’s coauthor, feel about his need to surround himself with friends and students during the last months of his life? How did his illness affect her? How did she feel about the sudden media attention and the loss of privacy? Did she consider coauthoring Letting Go with him, discussing how a wife prepares for her husband’s death? Letting Go and Tuesdays with Morrie reveal the need to overcome shame associated with a disease like ALS. We learn in Tuesdays with Morrie that Schwartz depends upon others for nearly everything except for breathing and swallowing—and even these two body functions are compromised at the end. He speaks with characteristic honesty when he reveals acceptance of his situation. Some of his statements are counterintuitive , as when he admits enjoying his dependency. One reason he needs to remain connected with others is to manage his death anxiety; another = Schwartz’s Letting Go and Albom’s Tuesdays with Morrie < 237 reason is to overcome shame. One of his goals is to “shame shame,” that is, to bring to light that which usually remains hidden. In the end we are powerless over death, but we can regard it as a natural process, without the shame and terror that often accompany it. A week before his death he tells Albom, in a raspy voice, “Death ends a life, not a relationship” (Tuesdays with Morrie 174). During the fourteenth and finalTuesday, Albom admits that he doesn’t know how to express farewell to his beloved teacher and “Coach,” to which Schwartz responds, in a barely audible voice, “This . . . is how we say . . . goodbye . . .” (185). They express their love for each other and, for the first and only time in the story, Albom cries. Schwartz dies calmly and serenely; dying is wrenching, but death is a welcome release. He dies when those attending him are momentarily out of the room, a phenomenon that occurs more often than not. Virginia Morris offers an explanation of this phenomenon. “I have been told that this happens because patients do not want their loved ones to see them go. They want to spare them that pain” (120–21). Albom does not cite Morris, but he endorses her explanation. “I believe he died this way on purpose. I believe he wanted no chilling moments, no one to witness his last breath and be haunted by it, the way he had been haunted by his mother’s deathnotice telegram or by his father’s corpse in the city morgue” (Tuesdays with Morrie 187–88). Schwartz appears not only at peace with himself throughout the story but also wise and benevolent. He acknowledges anger, frustration, sadness , and self-pity, but he always seems to act selflessly, as when he tells his sons, “Do not stop your lives. . . . Otherwise, this disease will have ruined three of us instead of one” (Tuesdays with Morrie 10). He consents cheerfully to be a research subject, a human textbook: “Study me in my slow and patient demise. Watch what happens to me. Learn with me” (10). His words evoke Tolstoy’s Ivan Ilych, who wears a medallion with the words respice finem inscribed on his watch chain: “look to the end.” Unlike Tolstoy’s protagonist, who reaches a transformative epiphany only at the end of his life, Schwartz’s death is consistent with his life: he dies in character. To compare Albom toTolstoy is not to imply that Tuesdays with Morrie has the literary power of The Death of Ivan Ilych. No story about mortality , fictional or nonfictional, rivals Tolstoy’s masterpiece in its language, 238 = “Learn How to Live, and You’ll Know How to Die” < insights, and power of observation. Tolstoy’s Olympian detachment and authorial omniscience remain unsurpassed. Albom shows the deterioration of Schwartz’s body, but he doesn’t capture, as Tolstoy does, the terror of mortality, including the lies, evasions, and self-deception surrounding death and dying. Nor do we experience in Tuesdays with Morrie, as we do in The Death of Ivan Ilych, a character’s profound existential and spiritual despair. Albom succeeds, however, in showing how an insidious disease like ALS ravages Schwartz’s body without weakening his indomitable spirit. One recalls Hemingway’s observation in The Old Man and the Sea: “A man can be destroyed but not defeated.” “A Teacher to the Last” Throughout Tuesdays with Morrie Schwartz embodies unconditional love. He is never angry or disappointed with his former student, never possessive or judgmental, never condescending or pedantic. He remains an idealized father figure from beginning to end. “If I could have had another son, I would have liked it to be you,”, he remarks when he is close to death (168). There are times when he appears almost saintly. His physical suffering—his struggle to speak, swallow, and breathe—conjures up the image of martyrdom. Some readers may believe that Schwartz resembles, in his wisdom, compassion, and unimaginable physical suffering, Jesus, a comparison that helps to explain Albom’s role as disciple. Schwartz’s blessing is important to Albom because for sixteen years the student feels guilty that he has neglected his former professor. As the story opens, Albom seems to be failing the “test” of life, and he cannot prevent himself from raising the question, “What happened to me?” (33). Thirty-seven years old when he reconnects with Schwartz, Albom portrays himself as a relentlessly driven person who, in his pursuit of fame and fortune, has lost touch with the meaning of life. Schwartz teaches him valuable life lessons: be prepared to reject a culture that promotes materialism and narcissism; remain connected with relatives, friends, and teachers; don’t be afraid to express emotions, including the need to cry; experience emotions deeply and then let them go; never forget that love is the most important part of life; and accept the inevitability of change, including death. The words Schwartz wants inscribed on his tombstone—“A Teacher to the Last” (134)—characterize his lasting = Schwartz’s Letting Go and Albom’s Tuesdays with Morrie < 239 impact on Albom, who becomes a faithful follower by writing the story of their friendship. Letting Go and Tuesdays with Morrie leave us with several ironies. Schwartz observes dryly to Albom, “Now that I’m dying, I’ve become much more interesting to people” (32). Albom becomes involved with Schwartz precisely at the time his mentor is in the process of detaching himself from life. Having forgiven himself for not writing more books, Schwartz writes one more book—two, if we count Tuesdays with Morrie, which reads like a coauthored work. Despite the fact that Schwartz had a long and respected career as a research sociologist and professor, few of us would know about the teacher were it not for his student. Albom constructs Schwartz into a national icon. The cynical Albom becomes humanized—tenderized—as a result of his meetings with Schwartz. The teacher’s influence on his student persists , as we can see from Albom’s later writings. In The Five People You Meet in Heaven, a character declares that lost love is still love. “It takes a different form, that’s all. You can’t see their smile or bring them food or tousle their hair or move them around a dance floor. But when those senses weaken, another heightens. Memory. Memory becomes your partner” (173). Schwartz states at the end of Albom’s story: “As long as we can love each other, and remember the feeling of love we had, we can die without ever really going away” (174). Albom reaffirms this belief in the epilogue to For One More Day: “Sharing tales of those we’ve lost is how we keep from really losing them” (197). Tuesdays with Morrie may not prove, as Henry Adams claimed, that a teacher affects eternity, but it does demonstrate that pedagogical wisdom may last a lifetime and affect countless people. ...