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Tuesdays with Morrie(1999) - official trailer

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Tuesdays with Morrie(1999) - official trailer

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Tuesdays with Morrie(1999) - official trailer

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“The truth is, once you learn how to die, you learn how to live.”

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Mitch Albom shares the valuable life lessons his dying teacher taught him.

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Morrie and his son

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Tuesdays with Morrie Quotes by Mitch Albom

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376 quotes from Tuesdays with Morrie: 'Death ends a life, not a relationship.'

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8 lessons

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I am an eternal writer. I love to share my personal experiences and thoughts with the world through my writing. I share to make a difference, inspire others and probably shake up every lost soul enough to select the right path. I am a bo...
More: How to tame your negative thoughts
"Study me in my slow and patient demise. Watch what happens to me. Learn with me," Morrie tells him. When someone is on their deathbed, their view towards life can change; they can realize what is important and what is not. As Mitch says in the book, "Morrie would walk that final bridge between life and death, and narrate the trip."

Here are the most powerful lessons I learned from the book.

1. Live every day as if it were your last

Morrie is happy that he has time to say goodbye to his loved ones thanks to his disease, which is slowly moving him closer to death. Morrie calls himself lucky; I am not sure if, under the circumstances he was in, I would call myself that. When I read his explanation to using this word, I understand what he means. He suggests doing what Buddhists do, which is: "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?'"

These simple words have a pool of information for each one of us. We must be ready to say goodbye to the world, any given day. How many of us can say that they are ready to die today? Of course, we may never be ready for death, but we must try to show our loved ones how much we care about them. We should not wait for a special occasion to express our love; we should make a habit of it. We should give our best to the world. Starting today, we should have a little bird on our shoulders too.

2. Remember to spend quality time with the family

Most of us have a tendency of taking our family for granted. If it is a Friday night, we start planning our outing with the friends. Sometimes, we have to be forced to spend time with our parents on holidays. Life is fun with friends and parties with them; however, the bond of love, which we share with our parents, is the ultimate one. Instead of keeping them at the bottom of our priority list, we must cherish and appreciate them whenever we get a chance.

3. Enjoy your emotions to the fullest

One should not hide from any emotion, rather one must experience each emotion entirely. If you love someone, love them with all you have; if you are sad, cry until you cannot cry anymore; so that when the same emotion hits you again, you know exactly what is going to happen. We hide ourselves from emotions because we are afraid to get hurt.

4. Money can never buy real happiness

Being a lover of luxurious things, I am still trying to absorb this idea. However, I agree with the explanation of Morrie. According to him: "If you're trying to show off for people at the top, forget it. They will look down at you anyhow. And if you're trying to show off for people at the bottom, forget it. They will only envy you. Status will get you nowhere. Only an open heart will allow you to float equally between everyone."We are blindly running behind money; we forget our kids, parents, relationships, and friends.

We are busy. We are always busy. Busy has become a word that is being used as an excuse all over the world. At the end of the day, money will only get us a good hospital bed to die in - and a good headstone. Is that what we are aiming for? Of course, money is important, but it is not more important than our family. One may argue that to take care of our family, we need money. That is true. However, if we do not have time to spare for our loving family, then I believe there is a problem with our plan.
More: 3 Ways friendship improves your health - not just your social life
5. Pay attention to the person you talk to

I wonder how many of us really listen while we talk! According to Morrie, it is really important to pay our utmost attention to the person you are conversing with. Imagine if this is the last conversation with your loved one, would you wish to let it go unheard?

6. Marry the person with the same values as you - and treat them well

As per Morrie, people should get to know about other people's values and beliefs; marry the person who shares your values and beliefs. A life partner is a very important part of our life. In our time of need, friends may come and go, but our life partner will be with us. During sickness, they are the ones who take care of us. Therefore, they should be treated with love, care and respect. As Morrie quotes a famous saying: "Love each other or perish."

7. Decide your own rules; do not let society steer your life

Morrie says that people are running behind things that do not - necessarily - matter to them. He says that we must believe in each other and ourselves. According to him: "Invest in the human family. Invest in people. Build a little community of those you love and who love you."He mentions we should rely on our own instincts to decide our thought process and actions - and not society. In his own words: "I don't mean you disregard every rule of your community... The little things, I can obey. But the big things - how we think, what we value - that you must choose yourself. You can't let anyone - or any society - determine those for you."

8. Forgive others, as well as yourself

We tend to hold grudges in life. Even if somebody apologizes, how many of us - truly - forgive the person? We may smile and accept, but there is a huge possibility that we do not forgive them. Forgiving another person not only releases a burden of one's own heart, but also makes us a better person.
More: Why Alzheimer's caregivers need to take care of themselves, too

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17 years after being published, Tuesdays with Morrie still has incredible lessons

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I am an eternal writer. I love to share my personal experiences and thoughts with the world through my writing. I share to make a difference, inspire others and probably shake up every lost soul enough to select the right path. I am a bo...

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Tuesdays with Morrie(1999) - official trailer

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Tuesdays with Morrie(1999) - official trailer

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Tuesdays with Morrie(1999) - official trailer

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

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

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Summary and reviews

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amyotrophic lateral sclerosis - patients - united states

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teacher-student relationships - united states

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biography & autobiography / personal memoirs

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self-help / motivational & inspirational

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teacher-student relationships - united states

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biography & autobiography / personal memoirs

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self-help / motivational & inspirational

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

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Maybe it was a grandparent, or a teacher, or a colleague. Someone older, patient and wise, who understood you when you were young and searching, helped you see the world as a more profound place, gave you sound advice to help you make your way through it.For Mitch Albom, that person was Morrie Sc...

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

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RIHS English / Background Information On Morrie Schwartz Life

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What We’ve Learned in Two Decades Without Morrie

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What We’ve Learned in Two Decades Without Morrie

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How the 'Tuesdays With Morrie' professor still helps us learn how to live

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Rob Schwartz has visited his father's grave outside Boston countless times. But his trip this week - which required a flight from Tokyo - had special meaning because he and many others are marking the 20th anniversary of the death of his dad, Morrie Schwartz. Yes, his dad is that Morrie, as in Tuesdays with Morrie, the biggest-selling memoir in publishing history, by Mitch Albom.

Less than two years passed from the time Morrie was diagnosed with the incurable ALS, or Lou Gehrig's disease, until he died in November 1995. In that short span, the late Brandeis University sociology professor may have done more to lift the veil on death than anyone since Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, who literally wrote the book "On Death and Dying" in 1969.
More They Walked Away When I Talked About Death
As the disease progressively robbed him of his motor skills, Morrie shook off any self-pity and invited friends and family to a living funeral months before his death so they could say things to him he couldn't have heard at a conventional memorial service. Morrie's thoughts on living and dying were featured in The Boston Globe under the headline: " A Professor's Final Course: His Own Death." And his lessons continued in a series of memorable ABC Nightline conversations. "This culture is so stuck on death," Morrie told Ted Koppel, "in terms of its fear, hiding it."

Let's Talk About Death

It's something Koppel had noticed after moving to the United States as a teenager from England. Americans seemed far more reticent than the British to talk openly about death. But Morrie was an exception. Weakened by disease and facing his own mortality, it became his mission to take death out of the shadows and into the light. And in doing so he helped instigate a cultural shift in our attitudes toward death.

"Our whole society's issue surrounding death is something that prevents us from living," says Dr. Katie Eastman, who founded Children's Palliative Care Community in Anacortes, Wash. to support seriously ill and dying children and their families. "Morrie said, 'You talk about death, you learn about life.' If we don't embrace the fact that life is finite, we forget how important it is to live."

Eastman worked with her mentor Kubler-Ross, whose groundbreaking book laid out the five stages of grief. "She was way ahead of her time. We're finally getting to the place she tried to get us to," said Eastman.

If we don't embrace the fact that life is finite, we forget how important it is to live.

- Morrie Schwartz

Indeed, from the public and private sectors, there are new efforts to mainstream death into the American conversation. The Obama administration's rule allowing Medicare to reimburse doctors for end-of-life conversations with their patients will take effect in January 2016. (Remember the talk of "death panels" when this was first proposed in 2009?) The Conversation Project, co-founded by journalist Ellen Goodman, is a grassroots attempt to get Americans to open up about their wishes for their final days. And Michael Hebb's Death Over Dinner campaign invites people to put the subject on the table in a more literal way.

Hebb, a teaching fellow at the University of Washington, had long believed that gathering people around a table for dinner and conversation was one of the most effective vehicles for changing the world. He was on a train from Portland to Seattle in 2012 when he got the idea for Death Over Dinner. On that train, two strangers, both doctors, each shared a statistic that spurred him to action: The vast majority of personal bankruptcies are related to end-of-life expenses and 75 percent of Americans say they want to die at home but only 25 percent do.
More 5 Questions to Ask at Life's End
Hebb then launched a national campaign called Let's Have Dinner and Talk About Death. On his website, he provides articles and videos about death for hosts to review ahead of their dinner to facilitate conversation. To date, Hebb estimates people in 30 countries have broken bread at more than 100,000 meals to discuss issues surrounding death, including how to formalize end-of-life plans.

Last year, Eastman led a Death Over Dinner discussion at the Chandler Square Assisted Living facility in Anacortes. Attendees ranged in age from their 40s to their 90s and included residents as well as members of the community. "It was powerful, a way to compel people, rather than repel people on the topic of death," Eastman says. There is a real cultural fear that if you talk about death, you create it. That's just not true. A group of us for many years has been trying to tell the public that death inspires. That's why I jumped on Death Over Dinner."

A Better End-of-Life Experience

David Kessler, who wrote On Grief and Grieving with Kubler-Ross, lost his mother when he was 13. "Elisabeth really opened the door and said we can talk about death," says Kessler. "Then, so much technology evolved in the hospital at the end of life. Now, as baby boomers are aging, so many people have witnessed their parents connected to this impersonal technology system and they walk away saying 'That wasn't the experience I wanted.' That's why personal stories like Morrie's resonate."

Kessler understands this firsthand. He was not permitted to visit his mother in the ICU on the day she died. "You had to be 14," he says. "When I was allowed to visit her in the days leading to her death, it was for five minutes every two hours. Even at 13, I instinctively knew this wasn't done well."

Kessler was in Australia, giving talks about death and grief, when he heard about one village's custom to honor the dead. "Everyone in the village the night the person died moved something obvious in their house or yard, a sofa or a lawn chair. Why? They want the person's family to wake up the next day, look out onto the world and see that everything has changed," Kessler says. "Contrast that to America, you wake up the next morning, your loved one has died and everything is the same." That's why he urges friends to call or pay a visit to those who suffered a loss six months or a year after the loss when they may need more support.

When we become more comfortable talking about and thinking about death, we can do a better job of helping those left behind.

In the conclusion to his TEDMED talk, Michael Hebb talks about his final days. "Since I was 17, I thought I'm going to die alone, slip off into the mountains. I don't want to be a burden to myself or family." he says, but then explains how his end of life wishes have changed: "All I want is to be surrounded by my two loving daughters."

Says Hebb: "Looking at death has taught me how to live." It's as if he's channeling Morrie Schwartz.

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What We've Learned in Two Decades Without Morrie

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Rob Schwartz has visited his father's grave outside Boston countless times. But his trip this week - which required a flight from Tokyo - had special meaning because he and many others are marking the 20th anniversary of the death of his dad, Morrie Schwartz.

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GREAT LESSON FROM MORRIE. EVERYONE WATCH!!

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Morrie Schwartz "You're Part of the Ocean"

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Mitch Albom and Morrie.

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(Tuesdays with) Morrie Schwartz: Lessons on Living, Ted Koppel Nightline Interview