“Tuesdays with Morrie” By Mitch Albom
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Morrie’s first jobs after plowing through a master’s degree and a Ph.D. from the
University of Chicago. Having
rejected medicine, law, and business, Morrie had decided
the research world would be a place where he could contribute without exploiting others.
Morrie was given a grant to observe mental patients and record their treatments.
While the idea seems common today, it was groundbreaking in the early fifties. Morrie
saw patients who would scream all day. Patients who would cry all night. Patients soiling
their underwear. Patients refusing to eat, having to be held down, medicated, fed
intravenously.
One
of the patients, a middle-aged woman, came out of her room every day and lay
facedown on the tile floor, stayed there for hours, as doctors and nurses stepped around
her. Morrie watched in horror. He took notes, which is what he was there to do. Every
day, she did the same thing:
came out in the morning, lay on the floor, stayed there until
the evening, talking to no one, ignored by everyone. It saddened Morrie. He began to sit
on the floor with her, even lay down alongside her, trying to draw her out of her misery.
Eventually, he got her to sit up, and even to return to her room. What she mostly
wanted,
he learned, was the same thing many people want—someone to notice she
was there.
Morrie worked at Chestnut Lodge for five years. Although it wasn’t encouraged, he
befriended some of the patients, including a woman who joked with him about how lucky
she was to be there “because my husband is rich so he can afford it. Can you imagine if
I had to be in one of those cheap mental hospitals?”
Another woman—who would spit at everyone else took to Morrie and called him her
friend. They talked each day, and the staff was at least
encouraged that someone had
gotten through to her. But one day she ran away, and Morrie was asked to help bring
her back. They tracked her down in a nearby store, hiding in the back, and when Morrie
went in, she burned an angry look at him.
“So you’re one of them, too,” she snarled.
“One of who?”
“My jailers.”
Morrie observed that most of the patients there had been rejected and ignored in their
lives, made to feel that they didn’t exist. They also missed compassion—something the
staff ran out of quickly. And many of
these patients were well-off, from rich families, so
their wealth did not buy them happiness or contentment. It was a lesson he never forgot.
I used to tease Morrie that he was stuck in the sixties. He would answer that the
sixties weren’t so bad, compared to the times we lived in now.
He came to Brandeis after his work in the mental health field, just before the sixties
began. Within a few years, the campus became a hotbed for cultural revolution. Drugs,
sex, race, Vietnam protests. Abbie Hoffman attended Brandeis. So did Jerry Rubin and
Angela Davis. Morrie had many of the “radical” students in his classes.
That was partly because,
instead of simply teaching, the sociology faculty got
involved. It was fiercely antiwar, for example. When the professors learned that students
who did not maintain a certain grade point average could lose their deferments and be
drafted, they decided not to give any grades. When the administration said, “If you don’t
give these students grades, they will all fail,” Morrie had a solution: “Let’s
give them all
A’s.” And they did.
Just as the sixties opened up the campus, it also opened up the staff in Morrie’s
department, from the jeans and sandals they now wore when working to their view of
the classroom as a living, breathing place. They chose discussions over lectures,
experience over theory. They sent students to the Deep South for civil rights projects
and to the inner city for fieldwork. They went to Washington for protest marches, and
Morrie often rode the busses with his students. On one trip,
he watched with gentle
amusement as women in flowing skirts and love beads put flowers in soldiers’ guns,
then sat on the lawn, holding hands, trying to levitate the Pentagon.
“They didn’t move it,” he later recalled, “but it was a nice try.”
