Mitch Albom, the author of bestsellers Tuesday With Morrie and The Five People You Meet in Heaven, was in Dublin recently. He kindly took some time to talk to the Techie about the impact that his books have had on his life and the lives of others.
So did it really change your life? After you had your Tuesdays With Morrie?
It still does, you know. I think people try to measure your change in quantifiable categories. "Show us how you've changed" or "list how you've changed" and the more tangible ways. Before I hooked up with Morrie I was working as a newspaper columnist 50 weeks a year, I had two weeks off, five columns a week. I lived three days in another State doing a television programme, three nights a week for three hours a night. I did five days of radio, 50 weeks a year. I did freelance magazine writing constantly every month and I did local television twice a week. It must have been a hundred and something hours a week.
Now I do versions of almost all that but, for instance, I write for the newspaper but only six months a year, and I write a couple of columns a week. I do radio but I only work eight months a year. I don't do any television anymore. So I've cut a lot of that stuff down. My days are filled so much differently now, they're filled with conversations. People telling me they were moved by a story, or mostly they tell me of someone that they lost, or a tragedy in their life, or an illness they're suffering, or what they went through with their brother or their father.
When The Five People You Meet In Heaven came out there was a whole new wave of people talking about what they hoped heaven was like or love, their love lives with their husbands or wives. There's a scene in that book where he gets to see his wife again, which apparently touched a real nerve with people who have lost their spouses. So, I hear a lot of that, and so you end up spending a lot of your days talking about those things.
I speak at universities, I speak at hospitals, I speak at hospices. I never went to any of those places before Tuesdays With Morrie. I am also probably less scared of death then I was before, less squeamish around sick people. I used to hate going into hospitals, I hated being around sick people. That was one of the biggest challenges with Morrie, just visiting him. I was so put off by his illness, and the smells, and the looks of it all, but there was no way around it and that was kind of a good crash course, just forcing yourself to touch dying people, and to hold dying people, and to smell dying people. And now it doesn't throw me at all, I'm completely used to it, any affliction, any state.
I assume your workload would have changed because obviously your entire career has taken a different perspective now. But how has your mental outlook changed. Morrie kept emphasising the importance of love and communication and that it is so important to be involved in the community.
I started a couple of charities after that whole experience because Morrie used to get on me all the time: "well what do you think, just writing a cheque, that's enough?" So I started this volunteer thing in Detroit immediately after he died, which is now going into its tenth year. We get big groups of people up every month on a Saturday to go build a house for somebody, or clean up some neighbourhood, or deliver some meals or some things like that. And I started some foundation for kids studying the arts. I mean there's lots of ways, it depends on your community.
But everything I think about, the time I spend with my family, the time I spend with my wife, the things I say no to now that I didn't before. I mean probably every element of my life in some way, shape or form, was changed by that. Not just Tuesdays With Morrie, because a lot of people think it was the book, but remember that I visited with Morrie in 1995 and the book didn't come out until 1997. I was already starting to go through a lot of that stuff. It wasn't like I thought the book was going to be anything. It was supposed to be a little, tiny book, nobody was supposed to read it. But then that became a whole other thing, in terms of once you're known as the person who wrote Tuesdays With Morrie or the person who wrote The Five People You Meet In Heaven, all your conversations begin with that. Now they stop me in the airport "Oh, oh, I just have to tell you, my grandfather had ALS and he died last month and we did a funeral service." It's not a twenty-second conversation, you know, you're there for twenty minutes.
Do you think people want a part of you? Do they want a piece of you?
Yes, but not in a bad way. They want to share their story because I shared mine. Its only fair, you know. They put in twenty hours reading my story, they feel, "hey, he probably wants to hear mine". And in most cases I do, because it's a great help. I used to work in stadiums with 20,000 to 100,000 people and never had any appreciation for the individual. I just looked at them as bodies screaming for a team, just a massive crowd. I don't look at people like that anymore. That's what you learn from all these kinds of conversations, how everybody walks around with something like that.
Is it not exhausting if you're constantly talking about grief and death? Is that not a very depressing life to live?
It isn't because it always ends with some kind of hopeful thing. You hear something that may be tragic, but usually people are sharing it because they have hope. You end up with someone saying thank you for listening, or thanks for giving me a new perspective, or thanks for sharing what Morrie said, or what Eddie said, or whatever helped me, and you end up walking away feeling like you did something. So, no it's the opposite of depressing. Actually I kind of like it and I find that I am enriched by it. It is time consuming and it can be draining, but in a good way.
So you went from writing a book about somebody dying to somebody who has died. Will the next book be about death too?
I don't know. Currently it isn't, but you never know when that might get introduced. I'm not obsessed with death as a subject. Tuesdays With Morrie was a story that ended in death. I couldn't do anything about that, it was a real story. I didn't really write The Five People You Meet In Heaven as any kind of death book. It's really a book about how lives are connected on earth. I just thought that the best setting for it was in heaven. It was sort of inspired by a real person also.
I had an uncle who was the polar opposite of Morrie. This was my grandmother's brother and he lived a good long life, he lived until he was 83. He had been a World War II veteran and after the war he never went anywhere. He stayed in the same apartment for the rest of his life, and he used to refer to himself as a nobody or nothing. "I've never been nowhere, I've done nothing," that kind of thing. I really adored him but I could never get through to him that I thought he was a special person for being a good guy. He died before this whole Tuesdays With Morrie thing happened, and I always felt that if I could somehow find a way to celebrate his life I would have done something for him.
After Tuesdays With Morrie I decided: a) I'm not going to write a non-fiction work because they'll just say it's not as good as Morrie; and b) I didn't want to write about a learned, wise person because I'd just done that. I thought it would be more of a challenge to take it from the opposite perspective. This character in the book, Eddie, dies on his 83rd birthday, trying to save this little girl from an accident in this amusement park where he is working.
All through the book, when he talks to each person saying "I could feel her hands when I was trying to save her," it really makes the reader want to know if she's still alive.
The reason I did that, and the reason I had him not know, is because the truth of it is that we all die with a bunch of questions unanswered. If we all knew exactly the day of our death we'd try to wrap up everything ahead of time. But wouldn't you think that a person who had a heart attack, a person who is hit by a bus, a person who is just suddenly overcome by some disease, don't you think if you were suddenly able to go with them to the other side - assuming there is one - and they were suddenly alert, the first thing they would want to know is what happened to stuff that is just going on beforehand. Are my kids ok? Did that project work out alright? Am I going to be remembered?
There are all these questions that we don't get answered. I thought what if the penultimate question in your life didn't get answered and you had to wait to find out There was more to that than just a mystery. But the point of the story, and what he finds out at the end, is how every life matters as much as the next one and everyone affects someone in some way. None of this has to do with death, it just happened to be a good metaphor setting it in heaven.
I was inspired to write it partly because of what's happened in my home country. We've become a place where if you are not a movie star, or an athlete, or a rock star, or on some reality TV show, it's like you're a second-class citizen. More important than money in America is to become famous, to be remembered in some way, shape or form. I'm always appalled by that so I wrote this book like a little fable. That was one of the philosophies behind it. Enough with this celebrity culture and this thing about having to be somebody. If you look at this guy, with grease under his fingernails and he touched this person, and this person, and this person, and this person affected all these other people...
I thought it was fantastic when you come to the end and all those people are standing there, and they're all people whose lives he touched. It's a lovely concept. When I started reading about the blue man in Five People You Meet In Heaven I was thinking how everything you do has consequences.
That's right. I'm walking proof of that. I mean, why am I sitting here with you if that's not true. Morrie happens to take time to talk to me, which he didn't have to do, and I write a book to help him pay his bills, which I guess I didn't have to do, somebody else sees it, gives it to somebody, enough people read it, that they ask me to write another book and I'm over here to talk about it. I mean it's scary how fast it happens.
But if I hadn't turned on the television that night I wouldn't be here with you. So how is that not fate? And how is that not one person influencing somebody else? I always say that people who dismiss those notions as corny or sentimental need to be told that they're wrong not the other way around. Everybody's favourite movie is a sentimental movie, everybody's favourite song is a sentimental song. I think sentimentality is wonderful. But the people who dismiss it are usually the people who have never had anything bad happen to them yet or they've never really recognised the experience that you've just described where one person is affecting another because, once you open your eyes to it, you can't deny it.
