would accept nothing less than excellence in school, because she saw education as the only antidote to their poverty.  She herself went to night school to improve her English.  Morrie's love for education was hatched in her arms".

With his stepmother's encouragement and support, Morrie as a youth studied hard each night "by the lamp at the kitchen table" ("The Professor").

Mitch Albom's 2009 nonfiction book Tuesdays with Morrie relates the author's weekly sessions at the bedside of his former academic mentor, Morrie Schwartz, a college professor dying from Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis, or ALS. Mitch had committed to staying in touch with his former professor following graduation, but his professional travails and ambitions have diverted his attentions and the relationship becomes moribund, This changes when Albom, watching the television program Nightline one evening, sees Schwartz being interviewed. Putting aside his professional focus, Albom begins to visit his former professor every Tuesday until the latter's demise, each session a new opportunity to learn from the slowly dying Morrie the importance of embracing life and not getting caught-up in the drive for material gain. It is not, the dying old man emphasizes, money and material items that provide true happiness, but the loved ones that surround you and the pursuit of a life dedicated to something more than professional ambition.

The significance of the relationship between the two characters in Albom's book, the author and his former professor, lies in the important insights the former gains from the latter. Morrie Schwartz has come to terms with his mortality and rests easily in the knowledge that his life was lived well. He is surrounded by loved ones, and he has sublimated material ambitions to the eternal pleasures of an existence steeped in personal relationships and the pursuit of knowledge. In his closing remarks, Albom states the following:

I look back sometimes at the person I was before I rediscovered my old professor. I want to talk to that person. I want to tell him what to look out for, what mistakes to avoid. I want to tell him to be more open, to ignore the lure of advertised values, to pay attention when your loved ones are speaking, as if it were the last time you might hear them.

Albom has learned valuable lessons from Morrie. He has learned the importance of human relationships and the short-sightedness of material ambitions. He has learned that death is, as he writes, "the great equalizer, the one big thing that can finally make strangers shed a tear for one another."

In Tuesdays With Morrie, Morrie is a college professor and a teacher by vocation as well as by profession. He is a man who has always been clever and thoughtful, but unlike many intellectually gifted people, he has gained true wisdom over the course of his life. Mitch Albom clearly regards Morrie as a moral and philosophical teacher, someone who has important ideas to impart.

Morrie shows humility, patience, and a keen curiosity about others. When he talks to Ted Koppel, a celebrity who is used to interviewing world leaders and Hollywood stars, he makes a strong impression, at least partly be returning Koppel's interest and treating the interview as a conversation. This is the way in which he approaches all his interactions with others.

Morrie is not a natural stoic or contemplative. He has strong emotions, which he does not try to repress, and demonstrates a fierce attachment to life. However, his wisdom allows him to put his illness into perspective, to accept it, and to live with it. His great strength as a teacher is that he shares what he has learned out of a genuine desire to help, rather than from egotism, which may have been a factor in his personality once but is now under careful control, along with self-pity. Morrie allows himself to experience negative emotions—but not to indulge them—and is committed to exercising a positive influence on his environment for as long as he can.

Tuesdays With Morrie is a book about living, dying, and staying connected with people who influenced a person in the past. Morrie Schwartz was a former professor (at Brandeis University) of a well-known sportswriter from Detroit, Mitch Album. When Mitch learns that Morrie has Lou Gehrig’s disease (also known as ALS), he begins to visit his former professor every Tuesday for fourteen weeks. The two men talk about various aspects of life and about what is really important in life.

Throughout his visits, Mitch watches Morrie’s health deteriorate. However, he realizes that he is still learning a great deal from his former professor. Morrie remains very positive even though he has a fatal disease, as he realizes that it gives him a chance to reflect on his life and share what he has learned with others. As a result of these meetings, Mitch is also able to reflect on his life. Eventually, Morrie dies from the disease, and Mitch is present when his ashes are spread on the ground.

This is a personal question and your answer is going to be completely up to you, but I would submit that even before Morrie was stricken with Lou Gehrig's Disease, he was the type of person who tended to look on the bright side of things.  At the opening of the book, Mitch Albom remembers him as:

...my favorite professor...He is a small man who takes small steps...when he smiles it is as if you just told him the first joke on Earth. (4)

Morrie already has something unique inside him.  Even before he knows he is dying, he is touching the lives of his college students as a man who clearly sees the world through irregular eyes and an unusually positive spirit.  The book does not chronicle anything before Morrie's journey toward death, so while it is impossible to pinpoint the exact why behind his wisdom, love, and grace, it is certainly clear that his advice comes from a lifetime of living what he believes, and not simply changing because of a disease he knows will take his life.

I might argue that Morrie must have had some very healthy and fulfilling relationships in his life.  He is a man who sees the good in people, which, in my opinion, is very often passed on to children by a mother or a father.  It is also clear (see the Fifth Tuesday) that Morrie has always had the support of a strong family.  I think the strongest forces behind the character he develops are his personal relationships and experience which comes from his age.

In Mitch Albom's memoir Tuesdays with Morrie, the character Morrie was Albom's favorite sociology professor, full name Morrie Schwarz, when Albom was earning his bachelor's degree at Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts. Morrie had been Albom's mentor, and upon parting at graduation, it had been clear that Morrie had grown deeply fond of Albom as well, fond to the point of tears at saying goodbye. Though Albom had promised to keep in touch, disappointments with the progress of his own life made him lose connection with all past acquaintances. Albom felt drawn to reconnect with Morrie when he happened to catch Morrie being interviewed on the show Nightline for having amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, otherwise known as Lou Gehrig's disease.

Albom immediately began a series of visits every Tuesday with Morrie; they treated these visits like a one-student class they called "A Professor's Final Course: His Own Death" in which Morrie instilled in Albom various points of wisdom about how to live life well. One of Morrie's greatest pieces of wisdom was to live each day like you are dying, or, as he phrased it, "Learn how to die, and you learn how to live." Other pieces of wisdom concerned putting limits on allowing yourself to feel self-pity, the importance of having the support of a family, the sacrosanctness of marriage, and many other valuable lessons.

Tuesdays with Morrie was written by Mitch Albom. In the story, Morrie learns how to become the opposite of his father. His father did not open himself up to people. The advantage was that his father assured himself that he would never be hurt by anyone emotionally. The disadvantage was that he barred himself from experiencing love and passion from friends in his life. Morrie calculated, as he grew up, that he would place a higher value on sharing love than on protecting himself from hurt. So his father served as a negative example from which he could learn to become a better human being.

Morrie became determined to avoid imitating his father's behaviors. His father became a lonely recluse. Morrie set out to build warm, engaging relationships with the people in his life. Even when Morrie has all the reasons in the world to isolate himself from everyone else due to his illness that leaves him practically incapacitated, Morrie chooses to interact with and love people, and he derives meaning in life from this choice. Being open as Morrie was does expose one to the possibility of being hurt, but Morrie learned from his father's ways that the rewards in life can be far greater than the risks if he shares his love with people.