Tuesdays with Morrie: Death, Dignity, and Personal Growth
This essay reflects on Mitch Albom's Tuesdays with Morrie, examining how Morrie Schwartz's experience with ALS challenges common assumptions about death and dying. The paper explores Morrie's insistence that dignity comes from within, his skepticism of cultural shame around physical decline, and his willingness to draw wisdom from multiple religious traditions including Buddhism and Hinduism. The essay also engages critically with Morrie's claim that child-rearing is the deepest path to love, arguing that elective and community bonds can be equally meaningful. It concludes with a personal account of losing a grandmother to Alzheimer's disease, contrasting that experience with Morrie's and reflecting on end-of-life decision-making.
- Death, Dying, and the ALS Experience: Morrie's slow ALS decline vs. idealized death
- Dignity, Shame, and the Power of Perception: Morrie rejects cultural shame through inner dignity
- Love, Trust, and the Question of Child-Rearing: Challenging Morrie's claim about children and love
- Cultural and Religious Views on Death: Buddhist and Hindu frameworks for accepting death
- Personal Loss: Alzheimer's and End-of-Life Decisions: Grandmother's Alzheimer's and end-of-life choices
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What makes this paper effective
- The essay moves fluidly between textual analysis and personal reflection, grounding abstract themes in both Albom's quotations and the writer's own family experience with Alzheimer's disease.
- The writer demonstrates critical independence by respectfully disagreeing with Morrie's claim about child-rearing and supporting that disagreement with concrete examples involving adoptive parents and LGBT communities.
- The conclusion lands with genuine emotional weight — the comparison between the writer's role watching a grandmother decline and Morrie's own situation creates a resonant, original observation that rewards attentive reading.
Key academic technique demonstrated
This paper models how to integrate direct quotation effectively: each block quote is introduced with context, followed immediately by the writer's own interpretation rather than left to speak for itself. The writer consistently moves from quote to analysis to personal or cultural application, demonstrating the "quote-analyze-connect" pattern central to literary reflection papers.
Structure breakdown
The essay opens with Morrie's physical condition and his psychological response to it, then narrows to the concept of dignity. It broadens in the middle to challenge one of Morrie's specific claims about love and family before widening further to examine cross-cultural religious frameworks. The final section turns inward, using a personal narrative about the writer's grandmother to test the book's ideas against real end-of-life experience. The movement from text to critique to culture to self gives the essay a satisfying arc.
Death, Dying, and the ALS Experience
In Tuesdays with Morrie, Mitch Albom recounts the afternoons he spent with his old college professor, Morrie Schwartz, after discovering that Morrie was dying from ALS (also known as Lou Gehrig's disease). For anyone interested in the study of death and dying, the book is a tremendous resource. When we speak about death speculatively or theoretically, many of us fantasize about living a long, healthy life and then dying quite suddenly in one's sleep. Morrie's medical condition provides the polar opposite: a slow wasting away, often in agonizing pain. Albom describes the effects of ALS later in the book:
His legs needed constant tending (he could still feel pain, even though he could not move them, another one of ALS's cruel little ironies) and unless his feet dangled just the right number of inches off the foam pads, it felt as if someone were poking him with a fork. In the middle of conversations, Morrie would have to ask visitors to lift his foot and move it just an inch, or adjust his head so that it fit more easily into the palm of the colored pillows. Can you imagine being unable to move your own head? (Albom 131)
The horrifying way in which Morrie's situation contradicts most people's wish for a quiet, swift death is not, however, received by Morrie with horror. Instead, Morrie — as befits an educator — treats ALS as essentially a learning experience and tries to offer it up to Mitch in the same spirit. In some sense, what Morrie is learning is that the subjective experience of such things differs fundamentally from the perception of them as an outsider. To anyone watching a person who cannot move his own head, the situation must seem horrifying and unimaginable. Yet Morrie Schwartz is quick to observe to Mitch that there are no innate qualities to the experience he is undergoing — the most important aspect is still his own subjective perception of it, something he retains control over.
Works Cited
Albom, Mitch. Tuesdays with Morrie: An Old Man, A Young Man, and Life's Greatest Lesson. New York: Broadway Books, 2002. Print.
Schwartz, Morrie. "Morrie: Lessons on Living (with Ted Koppel) — 8." YouTube. Video. Accessed 3 March 2014 at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dyPKXZSFSP0
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