Mitch Albom interview, copyright Victoria Mary Clarke, 2003

Some of us are born ambitious.  We want to make our mark in the world, make a name for ourselves.  And sometimes the Universe has a way of delivering what we want in ways that we couldn’t possibly have conceived of.  This is the story of one ambitious young man who achieved fame and recognition in a way that had nothing whatsoever to do with his own plans, and in a way that has inspired nine million people with an unusual message.
Mitch Albom was a shy,Jewish kid from New Jersey and he wanted to be a rock and roll star.
‘Kind of like Billy Joel’, he says, sitting before me in the Shelbourne, today.  ‘A piano man.’ 
Being a bright kid and a fast learner, Mitch attended Brandeis University, in Massachussetts and got a degree in Sociology.  And when he graduated, he moved to the Big Apple, in search of fame and fortune.  He took two things with him, one of which was going to make him millions.  One of the things he took was his gift for playing the piano.  The other thing was his friendship with an eccentric Sociology professor called Morrie Schwartz.  Logically, he was relying on the music to get him where he wanted to go.  And as luck would have it, logic let him down.
Mitch didn’t get to be the next Billy Joel, but he scraped by for a few years, in the Village.  Playing small clubs, in the evenings.  And  to stave off the boredom, in the daytime, he volunteered as an intern at a local paper.  They needed a sportswriter and that’s what he did.  Sports.  Later on he was to be voted America’s top sportswriter, eleven years running, but at the time he had no interest in sport.
‘I could just as easily have become a food writer or any other kind of writer,’ he says.  ‘It was pure chance that I got into sport.’
He still doesn’t have a particular passion for sport, even though he is known across America, on television and radio and in print for his opinions on it.
‘I’m not biased’, he says.  ‘Because it’s not my passion.  I like to think that’s something very valuable that I bring to sports journalism!”
After working his way up to the top of the league, Mitch found himself rolling in money.  Buying fast cars and property and stocks and shares and working all the hours God sent him.  Travelling all over the world, living on adrenaline and caffeine and much much too busy to think about home or family.  Pretty normal for a high flying, good looking guy with a fabulous career.
America is a society that is obsessed with youth and beauty.  And in the world of professional sports, youth is particularly essential.  Most professional athletes will have retired by the time they hit thirty five.  And by forty, life is over.  Mitch is now forty two and he’s deeply aware of the values that rule the world he moves in.  There was a time when he might have judged himself by those values, but something happened which altered the course of his life irreversibly and put paid to any ageist notions that he might have been developing.
One night in 1995, Mitch was flicking through the channels, -as you do,- when he spotted someone he knew. On a programme called “Nightline’, being interviewed by the journalist Ted Koppel was Morrie Schwartz, his Sociology professor from Brandeis University.  And Morrie was dying of a disease called ALS, a muscle wasting motor-neurone disease.  Morrie was being interviewed because of his unusual approach to dying, because he was giving a message to the American public that it was okay to die.  That there were positive things to be gained from the last great journey that we all make and that in dying, we can learn what living is really all about.  We can learn what is really important in our lives.
Mitch felt instantly guilty because he hadn’t been in contact with his old professor since he left College and now the man was dying and it would soon be too late.  And on impulse, he flew immediately to visit Morrie.  The dying man was delighted to see him and volunteered to teach him one final course, in which he would impart the most important lessons a person needs to know.  The lectures would take place every Tuesday afternoon and Mitch would be the only student. 
And so began a series of meetings, every Tuesday until Morrie died.  The death was to be his graduation ceremony, Mitch says.  And although no final exam was given, you were expected to produce one long paper on what was learned.  And that paper became a book called ‘Tuesdays With Morrie’.  The book was originally intended to cover the costs of Morries medical fees.  But even though Mitch was already a mega-famous sportswriter, a string of publishers turned it down.  They just didn’t think it would sell.  They were wrong.  It sold nine million copies.
 The book is wonderful.  It documents not only Morrie’s death, but also Mitch’s rebirth as a completely new man.  He goes from being a workaholic, success driven, hard bitten hack to a gentle, thoughtful family man, as he watches and learns and figures out that what’s really important in life is the quality of the relationships you have with other people and with yourself, it’s not the size of your house or what car you drive.  And he develops a new respect for the ageing process, seeing it not as something to regret, a process of losing the body, but as something to be gained, a process of acquiring wisdom and compassion.
Women love Mitch’s book.  I loved it.  I cried buckets, at the end, when Morrie died.  But maybe men will, too. The kinds of men who don’t believe they should cry.  Men like Mitch, sports fans who drink beer and workout and look tough.  Mitch is a very normal looking guy, there’s not a trace of sandals or woolly jumpers or crystals.  He’s a clean-cut, short haired, smart, straight talking guy.  A man’s man.
Mitch hadn’t cried for years, until he worked with Morrie.  Morrie softened him, taught him to really love.  He had never had that kind of relationship with his father, so Morrie became his mentor.  And his relationships with everyone else improved.  With his wife, who he had struggled to commit to,  with his estranged brother, who was dying and hadn’t wanted to talk to him. Now that he realises that love is the only thing worth striving for, he wants to have children.  Morrie said that having children was the most profound and unmissable of all human experiences.  There must have been an enormous hole in his life when he died, I say.
‘ Death ends a life, but it doesn’t end a relationship,’ he says.  ‘The relationship can go on.  And love doesn’t have to end with death.  That’s not anything deep or mystical, that’s just commonsense.’
After Morrie died, there were plenty of questions that Mitch still hadn’t asked.  He says ‘plenny’ in his New Jersey accent.
Are you tempted to resume the conversation?  I ask.
‘Sure, when and if I get to heaven, which is presuming a lot.  I would hope to have a chance to ask him a lot of things.  But I ask him those questions now.’
Does he get answers?
‘I don’t get answers like he comes to me and tells me things, but in knowing who he was, I kind of know what he would say.  I ask is he proud of me, if I’ve done a good service by him.  I talk about him a lot, to people and I wonder if I’m saying the right things.  But even by my asking that, it means I am thinking about what he would think, and that’s probably affecting my behaviour. Maybe that’s his answer, maybe he’s making sure I’m doing okay, maybe he’s watching over me.’
He tells me that even when my  mother dies, I will still hear her voice and remember the things she told me.  And as I pass these things on to my own children, my mother will live on.  I laugh, because I remember some of the ways in which my grandmother used to criticise me, when she was alive.  And he says that hopefully, we remember the good things they said.
We talk about the fear that we all have of our own death, and of the ageing process.  Of being lonely and unwanted and useless.  Of losing our independence and being a burden.  I tell him that when my grandfather was dying of cancer I couldn’t bear to look at him, so when I visited him, I pretended there was nothing wrong with him.  I ignored his pain and suffering.  Mitch says that before he talked with Morrie, he lost an uncle to cancer and that he had also been too frightened to acknowledge what was happening.  But he got another chance, with Morrie, and he took it.
The old man’s body was disintegrating horribly, as Mitch visited him.  He couldn’t lift his own head, could barely eat, would dribble his food.  Mitch had to help him to urinate and eventually, someone even had to wipe his bottom.  Was it not repulsive?  I ask.  Are we not afraid of ageing mostly for the very reason that it will make us ugly to other people and other people won’t want to come near us or touch us?  Morrie adored being touched and Mitch describes the delight he experienced, when people kissed him, or held his hand.  But isn’t it true, that old people do become sort of like the Untouchables, in society?  That as we lose our looks, people want to touch us less?  
‘Yes,’ he agrees.  ‘We are especially guilty of that in the States.  Of worshipping the young and pretty.  But it’s dangerous to regard ageing that way and we have a choice not to.  It’s only a body.  You get so as you see beyond the body to the person underneath.  And that person underneath doesn’t change, its still the same person.  You just have to remember that.’
Morrie gives advice on subjects like money, marriage, family, death and emotions.  He gives advice on every area of life.  Mitch says that he wasn’t always the kind of guy that listened to advice.
‘I’ve always been stubbornly independent.  I’m not likely to seek outside help.  I think if you do ask for help, you’ve got to be open to receiving answers and you have to be patient. I’m not very patient.  I would say  ‘I want to have a discussion with you, but then I want to go and figure it out for myself.’ Maybe that’s because I’m a guy.’
As it turned out, the lessons learned were experiential ones.  Seeing Morrie remain serene and good humoured, right to the end. Seeing him continue to give interviews and to receive visitors and to teach people.  And for Mitch, seeing the change in himself, feeling the love that he was able to feel, this was what changed him.  And inspired him to write the book.
Now that he’s had this extraordinary success, Mitch has abandoned the idea of being a musician.  He’s discovered his life’s purpose, which is to write more books.  He’s already written a novel called ‘The Five People You Meet in Heaven.’  Again, it involves an old man, this time a fictional character who dies, goes to Heaven and meets some important people who teach him what he needs to know.
‘I want to write another novel, if people can stand to read another one.  I haven’t had much experience of making stuff up, but it’s fun and I definitely want to do more of it.  I think I’ll get better at it, as I go along.’ 
I tell him that even though I liked the novel, what moved me about ‘Tuesdays’ was that it was real.  He laughs.
‘In order to write a book like ‘Tuesdays With Morrie’ you have to have met someone that is like Morrie,’ he says.  ‘And there aren’t many people like Morrie in the world.  If there were, I would spend my life writing down their wisdom.’
Mitch Albom might have had big dreams about being a rock star.  And those dreams might not have come true.  But it seems that life has a way of playing out that makes more sense than the things we dream of.  Every day, people read all kinds of rubbish.  But sometimes they find a book that really inspires them, really comforts them and really helps them in their lives.  And ‘Tuesdays With Morrie’ is a book like that.  Does Mitch think he could have inspired people in the same way with a song?
‘Do you know,’ he says, thoughtfully.  ‘I really don’t think so.  I was never that deep, as a songwriter!”
‘Tuesdays With Morrie’ is published by Time Warner Books and ‘The Five People You Meet in Heaven’ is published by Little Brown.