Twenty years after college, Mitch, now a high-flying sportswriter, saw his old sociology prof and mentor Morrie Schwartz on Nightline on TV, talking about how to live while dying. Morrie was dying of ALS, a particularly ruthless degenerative nerve condition. Mitch re-connected with Morrie, and they began meeting on Tuesdays, as they had years earlier in college:

“Mitch?” he said, “the culture doesn’t encourage you to think about such things until you’re about to die. We’re so wrapped up with egotistical things, career, family, having enough money, meeting the mortgage, getting a new car, fixing the radiator when it breaks—we’re involved in trillions of little acts just to keep going. So we don’t get into the habit of standing back and looking at our lives and saying, Is this all? Is this all I want? Is something missing?”

He paused.

“You need someone to probe you in that direction. It won’t just happen automatically.”

I knew what he was saying. We all need teachers in our lives.

And mine was sitting in front of me.

Together, Tuesday after Tuesday, as Morrie’s body moved closer and closer to death, Mitch and Morrie explored over egg salad and bedpans these topics: death, fear, aging, greed, marriage, family, society, forgiveness, and a meaningful life. The result is, in the words of Bernie Siegel, author of Love, Medicine & Miracles, “an incredible treasure. One’s sense of our mortality is a great teacher and source of enlightenment. To have a teacher share this experience provides us with profound wisdom and insight. I laughed, cried and ordered five copies for our children.”

In this “sweet book of a man’s love for his mentor [which] has a stubborn honesty that nourishes the living” (Robert Bly), Mitch slows down enough to take a good look at how he’s living his life. He’s our Everyman, cell phone in one hand and a slice of pizza in the other:

All I knew was this: Morrie, my old professor, wasn’t in the self-help business. He was standing on the tracks, listening to death’s locomotive whistle, and he was very clear about the important things in life.

I wanted that clarity. Every confused and tortured soul I knew wanted that clarity.