Tuesday’s with Morrie: An Old Man, A Young Man, and Life’s Greatest Lesson

Ted and Nightline conduct a second interview with Morrie, who admits to fears that soon he’ll be unable to communicate, something vital to him. Maurie Stein, a fellow Brandeis professor and longtime friend who sent Morrie’s aphorisms to the Boston Globe, is going deaf. Ted asks what it would be like for a deaf man to visit a mute one. Morrie answers that they would hold hands: “we’ve had thirty-five years of friendship. You don’t need speech or hearing to feel that” (88).

Morrie receives a great deal of mail since the first Nightline interview. One was from a teacher whose students each had a parent taken from them by death. Morrie reads his reply to her, saying that her work is important and that he wished he had such a resource as a child when his own mother died. He cries as he reads this aloud. Ted remarks that Morrie’s mother died 70 years earlier: “‘The pain still goes on?’ ‘You bet,’ Morrie whispered” (89). 

At age eight and part of a desperately poor immigrant family, Morrie must watch his mother slowly wither and die from an illness. He and his brother move from their lower Manhattan tenement to a communal cabin in the Connecticut woods for fresh air and relaxation.