Book Review of Tuesday with Morrie

Tuesdays with Morrie

What this book made me think about life, love, death, family, growing older, and the people we forget to appreciate.

The opening of Tuesdays with Morrie, where Mitch Albom describes his graduation, immediately felt familiar to me. I graduated only a few months ago, in the summer of 2026, and as I read his description of hugging professors and friends and promising that everyone would stay connected, I could almost feel myself standing there again.

Graduation is strange. You are excited about the future, but somewhere inside you already know that things are going to change. You promise people that you will never drift apart, but life slowly moves everyone in different directions. You don't necessarily choose to lose people; sometimes life simply becomes too busy.

One of Morrie's ideas that stayed with me was his idea of a "living funeral"—telling people what they mean to us while they are still alive.

I think we often wait too long to express gratitude.

Sometimes you don't understand the significance of something until it is no longer there.

I think about my friends from when we lived together in an apartment. We had a cooking schedule. When I came home late from work, sometimes my friend had already cooked something for me. When I needed someone to talk to, there was usually someone around who could sit with me and make things feel a little lighter.

Now I live somewhere else, and those ordinary moments have become memories.

At the time, they didn't feel important enough to remember. Now I miss them.

Maybe that's one of the strange things about life: some of our most meaningful memories are made from moments we barely noticed while they were happening.

I was also thinking about how differently people express love.

I grew up in a family where we didn't really say "I love you." Even now, translating those words into my own language and saying them out loud feels strange because it was never something we normally said. I don't remember growing up hearing my parents or other family members casually telling each other that they loved one another.

That doesn't mean there was no love.

There was love in cooking for each other, worrying about each other, sacrificing for each other, showing up when someone needed help. It just wasn't always spoken.

Living in the United States has made me notice how much more openly affection can sometimes be expressed. But even then, I wonder whether saying the words is enough. Maybe we should occasionally stop and actually tell people why we love them. What do we admire about them? What did they do that changed us? What are we grateful for?

We often wait until someone's funeral to say beautiful things about them.

Morrie's living funeral asks us to reverse that.

Don't wait until someone is gone to tell them what they meant to you.

The book made me think of the often-attributed Anne Frank idea that people receive more flowers after death because regret is stronger than gratitude. Whether or not that exact wording belongs to her, the idea itself feels painfully true.

We should give people their flowers while they can still smell them.

Learning to Let Go of Control

Mitch talks about being buried in accomplishments and trying to control every part of his happiness. That part felt familiar too.

We spend so much of our lives believing that if we work hard enough, plan carefully enough, and accomplish enough, we can control what happens to us.

But life has other plans.

You can wake up healthy today and have your entire life changed by something you never expected. You can lose someone. You can get sick. You can have an opportunity disappear. Someone you love can move across an ocean.

There are things we simply cannot control.

And maybe that is exactly why the things we can experience today deserve more attention.

I sometimes feel incredibly lucky just to have this life—to be healthy, to be able to run, to go to the gym, to cook, to read, to build things, to travel, to meet people and to wake up another morning with another day ahead of me.

Maybe living well is partly learning to appreciate the things that are temporary.

The People Who Taught Us

When Mitch describes his first encounters with Morrie and eventually returns to see him after sixteen years, I couldn't stop thinking about my own professors, Dr. Tim Hudson and Dr. Ghassan Alkadi.

I have wondered many times what will happen if I eventually leave the United States. I might not get to see them again for years.

I promised Dr. Alkadi that after winning Nexus DevDays, I would cook Nepali food for him. Somehow, we kept waiting for the perfect opportunity.

Maybe after graduation.

Maybe after I move to Baton Rouge.

Maybe once I settle down.

Maybe another weekend.

And then I realized something very simple:

As long as I have food and somewhere to cook, what else am I waiting for?

We spend so much time waiting for the perfect moment that we forget that life is happening in the imperfect ones.

Maybe perfection isn't the point.

Maybe being imperfect is part of what makes life worth remembering.

Love and Meaning

One of the passages that stayed with me was Morrie's idea that meaning comes from loving others, contributing to the community around us, and creating something that gives us purpose.

I think there is something beautiful about that.

We spend so much time asking, What can I get from life?

Maybe a better question is:

What can I give to it?

Love isn't only romantic.

It can be friendship. Family. Community. Creating something useful. Teaching someone. Helping someone when they need it. Cooking for people. Listening. Showing up.

The most important thing may be learning how to give love and also allowing ourselves to receive it.

I think many of us are much better at one than the other.

Death

One of Morrie's lessons is summarized beautifully by the idea:

Once you learn how to die, you learn how to live.

Death is strange because we all know it is coming, but we rarely live as though we know it.

We become jealous.

We hold grudges.

We postpone conversations.

We don't tell someone we love them because we are afraid of what might happen.

We keep waiting.

But none of us knows when our ending will come.

Maybe remembering death isn't supposed to make life depressing. Maybe it is supposed to make life more intentional.

If I knew that I had very little time left, would I really care about that argument?

Would I really want to spend so much time worrying about what someone thinks of me?

Would I keep postponing the dinner with my professor?

Would I keep telling myself I'll travel someday?

Maybe death reminds us to stop treating "someday" as guaranteed.

Family

Morrie speaks about family as one of the deepest sources of strength in life. Family, to him, is the group of people who will be there when you need them most.

That made me think about children too.

Morrie talks about having children as one of the deepest ways of learning to love and bond with another person.

I'm only twenty-two, and honestly, I don't know whether I want children.

Part of me looks at my life right now and thinks about how much I am already trying to build—my career, my health, my relationships, my projects, my identity. The idea of suddenly becoming responsible for another human being feels enormous.

I have also wondered whether a child could ever love a parent in exactly the same way a parent loves a child. The love a parent gives can be so enormous and unconditional that it seems almost impossible to reciprocate equally.

But maybe that isn't the point.

Maybe love isn't supposed to be measured equally.

Maybe the fact that you can love someone without expecting the exact same amount back is part of what makes parental love so extraordinary.

I don't know yet.

And perhaps I don't need to.

Some questions belong to the future.

Feel Your Emotions

Another lesson that stayed with me was the idea that we shouldn't constantly run away from our emotions.

Feel the sadness.

Feel the happiness.

Feel the fear.

Feel the love.

Feel the grief.

Sometimes I think we try to detach ourselves because we are afraid that feeling something deeply will make us weak.

But maybe avoiding an emotion doesn't make it disappear. It simply gives it somewhere deeper to hide.

I particularly connected with the idea of being honest about love rather than hiding it simply because expressing it might change a relationship.

Sometimes you need to say what you feel.

Sometimes you need to cry.

Sometimes you need to let yourself experience something completely before you can eventually let it go.

There is a strange courage in allowing yourself to feel.

Growing Older

When I was younger, I desperately wanted to grow up.

I thought being older meant freedom. More respect. More choices.

I wanted to skip the school days when my mother told me to study or when my cousins asked me to make tea.

Now I miss those days.

Growing older is strange because you spend your childhood trying to reach the next stage, only to eventually realize that every stage you leave behind becomes something you can never return to.

Morrie doesn't treat aging as something to fear.

Instead, growing older means accumulating experiences, relationships, lessons, and memories.

Every day teaches us something.

Maybe growing older isn't losing your youth.

Maybe it is gaining more of yourself.

Money, Power, and Tenderness

One of Morrie's observations that stayed with me was that money and power cannot substitute for tenderness.

I don't think money is unimportant.

Money gives us freedom. It gives us choices. It can provide security and make life easier.

But it cannot guarantee that someone will sit beside you when you're lonely.

It cannot make someone love you.

It cannot replace tenderness.

At the end of life, perhaps the question isn't how much you accumulated but what kind of life you actually experienced.

Who did you love?

Who loved you?

Who did you help?

What did you create?

What did you leave behind in other people?

Again, Morrie's idea comes back:

Love others. Contribute to your community. Create something that gives your life purpose.

Marriage

The chapter about marriage was interesting because I have absolutely no experience with it. Laughing.

But I have watched relationships around me, and I can understand Morrie's argument that people sometimes enter relationships without understanding themselves first.

How can you know who you want to spend your life with if you don't know who you are?

Respect matters.

Compromise matters.

Communication matters.

Shared values matter.

And perhaps most importantly, you have to be able to talk honestly about what is happening between you.

Love by itself probably isn't enough.

A relationship is something you continuously choose to participate in.

Culture

Morrie's lesson about culture also made me think about the expectations placed on us.

Every society has its own rules. Some are necessary. Some are harmless. But some quietly determine what we believe we are supposed to be.

Men aren't supposed to cry.

Men should be emotionally distant.

Success means money.

Happiness means status.

You should show your life online.

If someone doesn't reply, you should ignore them.

You should always be productive.

You should have everything figured out by a certain age.

But how many of those beliefs actually belong to us?

Morrie's point isn't that we should reject every rule society gives us. It's that we should consciously decide what we value rather than allowing society to decide everything for us.

I think that is increasingly important in the age of social media.

We are constantly shown what other people are doing, buying, achieving and experiencing.

Maybe the better investment is the one Morrie suggests:

Invest in people. Build a small community of people you love and who love you.

Love Each Other or Die

Near the end of the book, Morrie says:

"Be compassionate. And take responsibility for each other."

Then comes his simple mantra:

"Love each other or die."

It sounds almost too simple.

But maybe that's why it is powerful.

We have become so busy that sometimes we don't even have time to notice someone else's suffering.

Compassion isn't only about grand gestures.

It can be checking on someone.

Cooking for someone.

Listening.

Giving someone your time.

Being patient.

It can even extend beyond people—to animals, nature, and the objects that have quietly accompanied us through our lives.

I know that sounds strange, but I sometimes find it difficult to throw away something that has been part of my daily life for years—a cup I used every morning, an old notebook, something that carries memories.

Maybe compassion is partly about recognizing that we are constantly sharing a journey with things and people around us, even if that journey eventually ends.

What I Took From Morrie

I don't think Tuesdays with Morrie gave me a list of instructions for how to live.

It gave me questions.

Am I telling people that I love them while I still have the chance?

Am I waiting for the perfect moment to do things that matter?

Am I spending too much time trying to control things I cannot control?

Am I allowing myself to actually feel my emotions?

Am I building relationships or simply collecting accomplishments?

Am I becoming the person I want to become, or the person society tells me I should be?

And perhaps the biggest question:

If I knew my time was limited, would I live today differently?

I think I would.

Maybe that is the point.

We already know that the sunset is going to disappear, but we still stop to watch it.

We don't refuse to love something because it won't last forever.

Maybe life deserves the same kind of attention.