Mr. Brown’s sophomore English class made me cry on more than one occasion. It wasn’t just my recently diagnosed depression. It was the selection of books we read that year. We started off with the Puritan classics of The Scarlett Letter and The Crucible. Those weren’t so rough. But then we read Of Mice and Men. I finished the book while in study hall, crying all the way through the end. However, it wasn’t until I read Tuesdays with Morrie by Mitch Albom that I really had a good, healthy cry over a book.
When I was twelve, my mom suddenly passed away from a heart attack in her sleep. As a pre-teen, I was mostly sad. But when I reached high school, I simply became angry. I would sit quietly in my classes when I had once been eager to participate. I would somberly listen to Simon and Garfunkel on the bus ride home, thinking this made me cooler than the students around me who had never seen The Graduate. I was determined to remain detached from my high school of over 2,000 students. And in a school that big, it was easy to swim beneath the surface and go unnoticed, heading home to my cats and couch. But underneath the anger, I was still looking for something. Some answers. I couldn’t understand what had happened. Why my family had been put through the trauma of losing my mom. My brother had gone off to college and it was just me and my dad, stopping at the drive-thru and taking long rides around the neighborhood with the radio on because we were too depressed to go home to a quiet house and sit in front of the T.V. all night. Besides these drives with my dad, where we would talk about everything from the last episode of Dawson’s Creek we watched together to what sauce we should get on our chicken nuggets, I found my comfort in books. I escaped and enjoyed forgetting about life for a while. But I normally chose historical fiction or gothic stories like those by Kate Morton or Philippa Gregory. What I really needed was a book that would make me think about what had happened in my life and would maybe make me cry about it.
This is why I loved Tuesdays with Morrie. Morrie is a dying man who bestows his simple wisdom on the author. This was wisdom I needed. It was the reassurance that life meant something at a time when I was afraid nothing could feel normal again. I remember when I finished the book. I immediately declared it one of my all-time favorites and thanked my teacher for assigning it. When I am afraid of death or losing someone I love, I think about Morrie. Morrie helped me to appreciate the moments with my mom instead of focusing on how many moments I would not get to share with her.