Have you ever been scared to reread a book? I can think of a short list of books that I’ve adored that much. And yes, it can be nerve racking to revisit a book, movie, TV show, or even a piece of music that deeply impacted you once upon a time. What if it isn’t as great as you remember? Or maybe YOU are so different that the magic doesn’t hit you the way it once did. Well, I’m proud to say that when I recently revisited perhaps the most influential book of my life, it didn’t disappoint me in the slightest. That book is Tuesdays with Morrie by Mitch Albom, a novel I first read when I was eighteen.
It All Started During My Frantic, Fast-Paced Senior Year
My memories of that year blur together because I was so incredibly stressed out. I was taking multiple AP classes, keeping up a perfect 4.0 GPA, practicing competitive Irish dance on the weekends, practicing violin daily, and painting in a college-level art course once a week. All this while trying to keep up some semblance of a teenage life with my family, friends, and church group and at least attempting to bathe and eat regularly. Yeah right.
It was the art class that finally broke me. Just before the holidays, I made a disheartening discovery: I didn’t like painting anymore. This was a big shock since art had been a central part of my life since I was a child. It had been a huge honor to get invited to this advanced course, but alas, the class has turned into a huge burden. When I finally quit, I was relieved. Yet also disturbed. I had planned for years to double major in English and art then become an author and illustrator. It was now starkly clear that art was not something I wanted to do professionally. Like at all.
If being an illustrator was not for me . . . then what did that say about my ambitions to write?
Was Becoming a Professional Writer Just a Fantasy?
That warm feeling of relief after quitting my art class didn’t last long. I remember lying awake multiple nights, catastrophizing about what I wanted to do with my life. And whether my lifelong dream of being a writer was just that: a pipe dream. I knew I was a good writer. Literally everyone who had read my stories had told me so, but was I actually good enough to get published? Even if the answer was yes, everybody knows that novelists don’t make enough money to live off of. How had I never thought seriously about this before?
In the coming weeks, I flew into a frantic dervish of exploring my options. What did I want to do? Go for another lifelong interest and study mythology? Go the academic route and become a professor like my dad? Try something completely unplanned like music therapy? (That one was my mom’s idea, and I’m still laughing at myself for considering something SO wrong for me.) Or maybe my path was to become a counselor. I adored my AP Psychology class, and I was already the friend who everyone went to for advice . . . But the idea of staying in school for another seven years and taking lots of math and science classes made me bone weary. So what was I supposed to do?
Luckily, a Really Important Book Put an End to My Spiraling
It was right around this time that my AP Language class read Tuesdays with Morrie. We were assigned to read the book over Christmas break and come back in January ready to discuss it, so I curled up in bed one night to open it for the first time. I vaguely knew the premise of the book: a journalist rekindles a friendship with his favorite college professor, Morrie Schwartz, who’s dying of terminal ALS. The author, Mitch Albom, visits Morrie every Tuesday to ask this incredibly inspiring man big questions about life as Morrie goes through his end-of-life journey.
For a book with such a heavy premise, Tuesdays with Morrie is one of the most warm, human, intimate reads you’ll ever pick up. I remember feeling immediately disarmed by the sweet relatability of the characters. And it struck me every few pages that I wasn’t just reading a story. The book is actually nonfiction, and Mitch is transcribing real interviews that he recorded at Morrie’s bedside.
Then Came the Line that Made Me Cry
I’m not the type of person who cries when I read. I cry in real life over just about anything: sad news, other people crying, spiritual experiences, imagining my loved ones dying, animal rescue videos—you name it. But at eighteen I had never cried over a book before. I can think of a few times I got misty, but there were never actual tears.
Then one section of Tuesdays with Morrie hit me straight in the heart. It was the part where Mitch visits Morrie for the first time, and Mitch realizes how lost he’s become in his own life. He’s lost all his passion and direction. He’s financially successful and incredibly busy, but he’s not satisfied or happy. This one sentence hit me the hardest:
I traded lots of dreams for a bigger paycheck, and I never even realized I was doing it.
Tuesdays with Morrie, Mitch Albom
I remember reading those words while sitting up in bed that December night. And I put down the book and leaned my head against my bedroom wall as I openly wept. I’d never read anything that resonated so powerfully with exactly where I was in my own life. I knew right then that I was on a trajectory taking me exactly where Mitch ended up professionally: in an empty career based on what was practical rather than what he actually wanted.
I knew that I was a writer. I’d known since I was six years old actually. But faced with the unknowns of how exactly it would work out, all I could think about was the lack of money in that field and my lack of faith in myself. I’d very nearly talked myself out of pursuing the most important thing to me because I was scared and focused on what felt important rather than what was important.
I Finished the Rest of Tuesdays with Morrie in Two Days
Reading that book felt like coming home and also like drinking water for the first time somehow. I devoured it, but I also took the time to think about each section of the book before moving on. The beauty, sadness, and soul-deep joy of it was exactly what I needed at that time, and that feeling of clearing away the distractions in my life to seize what really mattered carried me straight through to January.
That month, I made a life-changing decision: I was going to become a writer. Maybe I didn’t understand all the ins and outs of financially supporting myself with that skill, but I was definitely going to give this dream a chance. So with renewed confidence in my heart, I declared myself an English major before I even headed to college—and never changed my major even once.
For the Record, that Decision Was the Right One
My writing dream shifted and matured over the years as I completed my schooling and found my first job two months later. I built a decade-long career in marketing, copywriting, and editing while still writing six fantasy novels in my spare time. The same girl who was scared of supporting herself went on to build a comfortable life and buy a house all on her own. I’m eternally grateful that Tuesdays with Morrie found me at exactly the right time to show me that my feet were on the right path all along.
In the years since reading that book, I thought about picking it up again many times. There’s a famous quote out there about rereading great books three times: once when you’re young, once in middle age, then once again when you’re old since books resonate very differently at different points in your life. Once I hit my thirties, my desire to reopen Tuesdays with Morrie started to grow. Just to see how it would feel reading it again.
But alas, I was too scared to open it. The book had changed my life at such a pivotal time. How could I sit down on some random afternoon to read such a masterpiece like any old library book? As time passed, that original well-loved copy remained on my bookshelf, untouched yet filled with magnetic energy. I knew I would get to it someday when the timing felt right . . .
Then Came Some Devastating News
This past April, my husband and I received the life-changing news that Andy’s dad was dying. It didn’t come completely out of the blue. We’d known that his health was declining, but when multiple hospital visits and countless tests finally culminated into a cancer diagnosis, the news was still shocking. We knew we had some time to fly across the country and see him. He was planning to pursue treatment, so his prognosis was another year on the high end. When Andy talked to him on the phone, Dad sounded calm and determined to make it to his ninetieth birthday.
But despite our cautious optimism, that year-long timeline wasn’t meant to be. His prognosis quickly shrank to just two months. Less than a week later, the doctor was predicting Dad had only days left, not weeks. Andy and I immediately purchased one-way plane tickets to Harrisburg, canceled all of our plans, and packed to leave the very next day.
It was a long, exhausting evening of tears, stress, and hard conversations. Sorting through Andy’s intense grief. Processing my fears of traveling while pregnant. Trying to comprehend the situation we were walking into and how best to help Andy’s family navigate the end of their father’s life. Facing the devastating reality that my father-in-law was never going to meet our children, not even the daughter I was carrying.
In the midst of all the pain and overwhelming feelings, I was trying to decide what to read on the plane. And before I could question my decision, I pulled Tuesdays with Morrie off the shelf.
It Was Time to Reread the Book
Considering the circumstances, I knew this book choice was super on the nose. But walking directly into an end-of-life situation, I knew my fears of rereading the book didn’t matter anymore. I needed its warmth again. Right now.
As I opened it for the first time in seventeen years, that undeniable feeling of coming home came back. And it made me feel steady despite everything. I was particularly interested to reread the quote that made me cry so many years ago. I was in a completely different era of my life, so it didn’t draw tears this time. Instead it made me glow. I did put the book down for a minute to think about how far I’d come both personally and professionally in my life. I certainly hadn’t chosen a paycheck over my dreams. Somehow I’d figured out a way to choose my dreams AND a great career that had carried me so far. In that moment, I felt proud of my eighteen-year-old self for having the courage to make the right choice.
As I got into the parts of the book about death, the grim realities of terminal illness, and family members being left behind when parents die . . . that hit differently too. I lingered on the page where Morrie admitted that he felt lucky to have a slow-moving disease. One that allowed him time to learn and grow, to accept his imminent death, and to say all the goodbyes he wanted to say. ALS is a brutal disease on the body, but it left Morrie’s mind whole and intact far into the process of his illness. Deep in my gut, I agreed that in some ways that was a great fortune. It was also a situation Andy’s dad wouldn’t have.
My Reread Went on Hold Once We Reached Pennsylvania
We were lucky enough to be with Dad on his last two good days. There was time to talk, to show Dad our ultrasounds, and to reminisce about the past. But the experience got harder each day as he deteriorated. Much of what we experienced at the end of my father-in-law’s life is too personal to share, but it struck me over and over how much Tuesdays with Morrie got exactly right about the experience of watching someone die. The confusion of all the medications and paperwork and nurses coming and going. The distinct smell of approaching death made fifty times worse by my sensitive pregnant nose. The random moments of levity in the house where we’d all laugh—then feel strange afterwards for experiencing something so normal at such a devastating time.
Everything was enveloped in this strange fog of wrongness. It felt wrong for Andy and I to be watching one of our parents die in our thirties. Surely we were too young for this. It felt even more wrong how little time I’d had to get to know this man. In three years of marriage, this was the fourth time I’d met my father-in-law. Other family members reassured me that he was stoic and none of them knew him as well as they would’ve liked. But it still felt wrong for a near stranger like me to be part of so many personal family moments. The process of dying is a terribly intimate thing . . . And unlike Morrie’s long journey of losing functions one by one, Dad’s decline was too sudden to give even himself time to adjust to the overwhelming changes.
I longed to keep reading Tuesdays with Morrie in search of more details I could relate to, but I couldn’t bring myself to open it while we were caring for Dad. It felt wrong to read a book about a man dying when my husband’s father was actually dying in the next room.
Just Eight Days Later . . . He Was Gone
Dad passed away in his home of forty years, precisely where he wanted to be. It was hard to know how to feel in the days leading up to his funeral. As I watched Andy and his siblings each grieve their loss in their individual ways, I threw myself into writing Dad’s obituary. It was a final act of trying to help while also getting to know this man a little better.
I was pleasantly surprised to learn what we had in common. We were both English majors in college and both liked to write. And the details I learned of his relationship with his children both charmed and comforted me. Perhaps I didn’t know him in life as well as I wanted to. But I now understood the legacy that he’d left behind in this large family that I’d gotten to know so much better through this harrowing experience. A family that I’m a part of. It was the first time in this whole experience that something felt right.
As suddenly as we’d paused our life and raced to Pennsylvania, Andy and I once again got on a plane back to Utah the day after Dad’s funeral. Our hearts were heavier than when we left, but we were also ready to be home.
On that Plane Ride, I Finally Finished the Book
There were only a hundred pages left. Part of me wasn’t sure if I could handle reading about Morrie dying after we had just lost Dad in real life. But I was willing to try. As I read about Morrie’s final weeks and his last few lessons about life, there was one section that stood out more than the others: his lesson on forgiving people.
“It’s not just other people we need to forgive, Mitch,” he finally whispered. “We need to forgive ourselves. . . . For all the things we didn’t do. All the things we should have done. You can’t get stuck on regrets of what should have happened. That doesn’t help you when you get to where I am.
“I always wished I had done more with my work; I wished I had written more books. I used to beat myself up over it. Now I see that never did any good. Make peace. You need to make peace with yourself and everyone around you. . . . Forgive yourself. Forgive others. Don’t wait, Mitch. Not everyone gets the time I’m getting. Not everyone is as lucky.”
Tuesdays with Morrie, Mitch Albom
Maybe it was because I’d just seen so many people grapple with the loss of a loved one, reminiscing about the good and the bad in their dad’s life, that these words brought tears to my eyes. Of everything in the book, that felt relevant to where I am right now. I guess by the time you reach your thirties, everyone has had time to be hurt deeply by a few people. Or maybe a lot of people. Sometimes the person you resent the most for messing up is yourself.
For me, these gentle, powerful words meant something deeply comforting. And I knew in that moment that I did have time to figure out the things that still haunt me. Time to forgive the people who’ve exited my life and a few who are still in it but haven’t done right by me. Most importantly, there’s time for me. Time to become who I want to be. And time to experience life in all its imperfect, complicated, yet meaningful joy. In that moment, on that plane, I felt ready to meet life exactly where I’m at.
We Were Still High in the Clouds When I Finished Tuesdays with Morrie for the Second Time
When you know a sad but good ending is coming, it’s much easier to meet it. To give it the honor it deserves and take the time to soak in the way it makes you feel. As I stared out the window at the golden clouds, I let my heart feel gratitude for the preciousness of life. For the man I love deeply and the man who’d raised him years before we found each other.
As I watched the light redden in the clouds, I thought through the events of the past few weeks. And I found myself wondering what this book would mean to me when I read it for the third time. It’s impossible to predict the future, but somehow I knew in that moment that Tuesdays with Morrie was sure to find me again at exactly the right time. ❧
