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This is Fresh Air.
I'm Tanya Mosley, and my guest today is Mitch Albom.
It was 30 years ago that he wrote, Tuesdays with Maury, a tender true story about the lessons he learned from his old college professor, Maury Schwartz, who died of ALS.
The book became one of the bestselling memoirs of all time, with its simple but profound reflections on living, and that experience set Albom on a path he's walked ever since, writing stories about love and loss and the search for meaning in the face of mortality.
His latest novel, Twice, starts with a question most of us have probably daydreamed about.
What if you had the power to redo any moment of your life?
In the book, a man named Alfie is born with the ability to go back and relive any moment he chooses.
But with every second chance comes a cost.
He can't change matters of the heart, and he can't stop someone from dying when it's their time.
Since Tuesdays with Maury Albom, has written eight bestsellers, including The Five People You Meet in Heaven and The Stranger in the Lifeboat, many of which have been adapted for stage and screen.
He's also been a sports columnist for the Detroit Free Press for over 40 years.
But those visits with Maury didn't just shape the writer album became.
They also changed how he moved through the world.
Maury once told him that giving makes you feel more alive than taking.
A lesson album took to heart.
He runs nine charities in Detroit that supports veterans, students and people in need of housing and medical care.
And for the past 15 years, he's also operated an orphanage in Haiti.
Mitch Albom, welcome to Fresh Air.
Thank you for having me.
Okay, so Mitch, in this book, Alfie has this incredible ability.
He can go back and relive any moment of his life.
And he uses it in the way that we all would expect to use it if we had this power, especially when he was a kid.
He used it to stop bullies, to impress girls.
But as he gets older, this power becomes more complicated.
What drew you to write about the darker side of this kind of fantasy?
Probably just getting older.
I think when you're younger, if you want to try something different, you do.
You want to switch your career, you do it.
You want to switch who you're dating, you do it.
You want to move to another country, you do it.
But I noticed as people get older, concrete settles a little bit more and it's harder to just switch out.
And so those would-be switches start to turn into regrets.
And then they start to turn into that question in your head if only I had taken that job, if only I had moved to that country, if only I had picked that different person to marry.
And so I realized that this is probably a pretty universal theme.
And I wanted to explore what would happen if you actually had the ability to do that and not to time travel 15 different times and do it over again.
That seemed kind of pointless.
But you get one more crack at it.
Would that second crack really be better, or would it just bring with it a whole new set of circumstances?
And as Alfie gets older, that's what he starts to discover.
And then he also learns of one particular caveat with the power that he didn't know about, and that is that it doesn't work with love.
And if you turn your back on a true love to try to go find somebody else, that person can never love you again.
They'll be in the world, you can know them, but they'll never feel the same way about you.
And so this power comes with that consequence as well.
And of course, as you can imagine, since I'm a writer, he has to make a very fateful decision at one point in the book, and I'll sort of leave it there.
So the rules are clear.
You can't make someone love you twice.
There's also a second rule here.
You also can't change when a person will die.
So basically, love and mortality are the two unchangeable forces.
What made you choose those particular limits?
Well, mortality...
That was easy because you can't change mortality.
And in fact he discovers this at the beginning of the book, when he first discovers his power, because he's eight years old.
He doesn't know he has this power.
He's in Africa with his parents who are missionaries.
His mother gets sick.
She's in bed.
And he goes out to play.
Instead of sitting with her.
His father wants him to sit with her, but his father leaves and he says well, she's sleeping.
You know, why do I?
I'm eight years old.
I just go out and play.
So he goes out and plays.
And while he's out playing, she dies.
And when he comes back in he realizes he he missed her death and he was playing and he's so upset and he's so angry with himself.
And he's so, you know, and through the course of the night, he sort of like engenders this power.
He brings it upon him and he wakes up the next morning and it's the day before.
And his mother is still alive in bed and he goes.
This time he goes and he sits with her and she opens her eyes and she sees him and they have a last discussion together.
And she tells him all the things that he loves, that she loves about him.
She says, sit here, let me, because she realizes he has this power.
She says, sit here before I, before I die, let me tell you all the things I love about you.
But he still can't change the fact that she dies.
And he ultimately ends up saying that you know He was playing Superman when she died and he writes a sentence my mother died while I was trying to fly.
And, Tanya, I actually wrote that because my mother died while I was on an airplane.
I had just gone to visit her in California.
She had had a stroke and couldn't talk, and I missed having a last conversation with her because no one knew, of course, a stroke was coming, and then all of a sudden she couldn't talk anymore.
And so we were for months.
We just were sitting with each other and looking at each other and that type of thing.
And I had gotten on a plane to fly somewhere and when I landed my brother called me and said Mom died, you know, while you were flying.
And so that scene to me was very poignant.
And for all my wishing, I knew I couldn't make her come back.
So the whole idea of being able to change mortality was kind of inside me already.
And I wanted my character to have that limit too.
The second part of your question, why love?
That's deliberate, because I believe that, And the point that I wanted to make with Twice was that love is different than It's not the last shot of a basketball game.
You don't go back and just change the play, get the ball a little differently, throw it in.
The ball goes in.
Instead of missing, you win the game done.
Love starts with the ignition, but you have to keep it going.
And it is, to me...
The hundredth day of being in love and the thousandth day of being in love and the ten thousandth day of being in love are all part of love.
And if you want to, you could no more go back and start all over again and get that same thing back.
Then you could take river, take water that had run downstream from a river and say, let's put it back upstream.
It's happened already.
So I made the rules like, uh-uh.
If you decide this person's in love with me and we've been in love for years, but you know what?
I kind of like that one over there.
All right.
Make that decision, but you don't get to take that love with you when you make that decision.
That's gone.
And I thought, I hope and I do hope that people will read it and make them maybe think about that whole grass being greener, with somebody else idea, because it's not just the first blade of grass.
It's the whole lawn that you have to do all over again.
You know Mitch, there's also the lesson that really, when you get to do things over and over and over, you don't really learn much.
Yeah.
And that, Tanya, is kind of the takeaway from it for me.
You know a number of people since the book has come out have asked me so is there anything in your life that you would do over again?
And I think some people expect that I would say no.
I don't know.
They think Tuesdays with Maury has turned me into a Zen master or something and I would say no no, all is what the universe is supposed to be.
No, of course I would do things over in my life.
I can rattle off 30 things right now.
But if you said to me in doing them over, you have to surrender whatever you've learned and whatever you've done as a result of what you've learned from your mistakes—, then I wouldn't trade it, because all of those things that I would redo, the consequences of those things, Made me into who I am now.
You know, it's like taking out a piece of the tapestry.
It falls apart.
So I wouldn't go back and undo things if I had to sacrifice what I had learned from doing them.
And Yaya, his grandmother, at one point says to him, he says, how come we only get to go back twice?
You know, why don't we get to go back again and again?
She says, Alfie, if you kept getting second chances, you wouldn't learn a damn thing.
Hmm.
And, you know, really, even if you get one, sometimes you don't learn anything.
This idea that as we get older, we become more set in our ways.
We don't take chances.
We don't try things.
We don't try new things.
We don't do things over.
Was there a particular seed for you?
What were you wrestling with when you kind of came up with this idea?
Yeah.
Well, I wasn't wrestling with it as much as being a byproduct of it, to be honest with you Tanya, because I am kind of a walking example of a second chance.
Many things in my life I did in the first part of my life that would have set the pattern for maybe a whole different second half.
And then things happened, and I ended up getting different opportunities.
And I watched how you can sort of bifurcate your life if certain things happen.
And I thought, well, I've got experience in sort of a second act.
Maybe I can work it into a book.
I mean, one of those second acts we know very well.
You were a sports writer for a very long time or just for the first half of your career.
And then you had this fateful interaction with an old college professor Maury, who was dying of ALS.
Was that kind of a second chance as well?
A hundred percent.
Yeah, that probably is the – if my life were a graph, that would be the point where you put the –
The pencil in and you start drawing the line the other direction because it was a huge pivot for me.
I didn't realize it at the time, but I had been extremely ambitious, extremely kind of singularly focused on becoming, you know, the best sports writer ever that there could, be the most well-known.
I was on ESPN.
I did a column that was nationally syndicated across the country.
I did radio.
I was going 100 miles an hour and 100 hours a week.
And I happened to see my old college professor, Maury Schwartz, on Nightline.
I just was flipping the channels and he was talking to Ted Koppel about what it was like to die from Lou Gehrig's disease.
And that was the first I found out that he had this disease.
And he and I had been extremely close in college.
I mean, I had taken every class he offered.
I majored in sociology because of him.
I wrote my honors thesis with him.
And I had always promised that I would stay in touch.
And then as I became this ambitious animal...
I broke that promise for 16 years.
And all of a sudden, here he is on television telling an interviewer that he's about to die.
And so I called him up, thinking that I would just ease my conscience with a phone call.
And he kind of guilted me into coming to visit him once.
So I thought, well, I'll just go once and ease my conscience that way.
And when I saw him in person, it was...
It was so moving to see, you know, how he had been stripped of so many things by the disease.
He couldn't walk anymore.
He could barely lift a piece of tomato up to his mouth.
It took him a minute and a half to chew a single piece of tomato.
He's having trouble breathing.
But he seemed so content with how he had lived his life and so interested in exploring dying, and He had this amazing attitude about life.
When I went home that night, I said you're 37 years old and perfectly healthy, and he's 78 years old and dying, and he's 10 times happier with his life than you are.
And something's wrong with that picture.
And so I started to go back, and I did not realize it at the time, but that was the pivot moment in my life for everything that has come since.
Yeah.
I mean it's so amazing because really I mean, when you look at the totality of almost every book that you've written after Tuesdays with Maury, they all tie back in a very direct way to a lot of the lessons that are written in that book.
You know it also—you wrote that book at a time when baby boomers in particular were starting to face their parents' mortality.
You kind of gave—
And I was curious, when did you begin to realize how profound of an impact the book was having?
I probably realized it most poignantly in airports because I, as I mentioned, I've been on ESPN regularly for years prior to that.
So my face was recognizable to a lot of people. particularly sports fans.
And I used to get stopped in airports and people would say, hey, sports guy.
You know, sometimes that's all they would call me, sports guy.
You know, or sometimes they'd say, Mitch, who's going to the Super Bowl?
And I would just say, you know, the New England Patriots and get on the escalator and keep going.
Because first of all, the answer was always the Patriots back then.
So that was easy.
And secondly, that's all they wanted from me.
And then I began to notice that people would come up to me with a different sort of tone.
They would say, you're Mitch Albom, right?
And I'd say, yeah.
My mother died of cancer.
And the last thing we did was read Tuesdays with Maury together.
Can I talk to you about her?
And you can't say New England Patriots and get on the escalator.
You have to stop and you have to listen.
And I began to become a listener.
You know, I want to ask you about that time period when you were really being celebrated for Tuesdays with Maury.
You won this very prestigious honor, the Red Smith Award for Lifetime Achievement in 2010.
And When that happened, there was some criticism that rose up during that time.
Some called your work feel-good, fairy tales fluff, and others said it was verging on being emotionally manipulative.
And I wondered, do you ever struggle when you write about real grief and real death and this line between moving—
Well, I think it's kind of cynical to look at something that moves people and say oh, you're just manipulating them.
I don't know what drives a person to think of criticism like that.
I don't think I've ever looked at anything that's moved me and felt that the author, the director, the songwriter was out there to just try to trick me.
I've never done that in my life.
I wouldn't know how.
And in fact, what's funny is Tuesdays with Maury.
I had one goal in writing Tuesdays with Maury, from a writing perspective, and that was don't overdo it.
You know, I had read – I was a sports writer.
I'd never written anything like that before.
And I read a bunch of books about death and, you know, different accounts of death.
And they were beautiful.
You know, some of them were so beautiful. poetic in the words they use.
And I said to myself, you can't do that.
You don't have that skill set at your age. and your experience with sports, keep it simple.
Just strip it down.
In fact, when I turned the book in, it was supposed to be 300 pages and I didn't really keep a very good count of it.
And they called me up a week or two later, and they said, we have a problem.
I said, what?
They said, well, we laid this out.
We paginated this, and this is only going to be like 175 pages.
And I said, well, that's all I got.
That's it.
So, if anything, I was going out of my way not to be manipulative or anything like that, or overwrite or over sentimental.
So I hadn't really heard that a lot.
But now that you're telling it to me, I don't – I certainly don't do that.
And I think when you write about people's grief and you write about love and you write about human emotions, you are doing what artists have done since –.
You know, time immemorial.
OK, but it's not it's not I don't sit there going, oh, this will make them cry.
I don't have that power.
Let's take a short break.
If you're just joining us, my guest is writer Mitch Albom.
We're talking about his new novel Twice and his remarkable career writing about the questions that define us how to live well, love fully and face the choices and second chances that shape our lives.
We'll be right back after a short break.
I'm Tanya Mosley, and this is Fresh Air.
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So much of your sports writing was very narrative based.
So, yes, you were writing about the winning of games and play by play.
But you also are writing these really deep, well thought out columns and pieces in Sunday paper.
Yeah well, I always felt that first of all sports.
I never got into sports because I was that interested in sports.
I got into sports because that's where the job was when I got started and because I thought that it was a great tapestry to talk about human emotion.
You know, there's always a winner, a loser.
There's the agony of trying, and then you come up short because you get injured.
There's so much emotion involved in it.
But I'll give you a perfect example Tanya, of something that I wrote that appealed to me and is the kind of emotion that I think good writing contains.
It's probably the biggest reaction I ever had to a sports column I wrote.
And I write in Detroit.
I write for the Detroit Free Press.
It was not about a Detroit team or a Detroit athlete or a Detroit sports story.
It was about a person who no one in my market had ever heard of before.
I was at the Olympics.
I think it was 1992.
In Barcelona.
I had gone there early to the stadium to prepare for Carl Lewis.
The famous Olympian was running in the 100 meters that night.
And I knew that it would be hard to get a seat.
So I had gone there really early to get a good seat where I could see the race.
And I figured I'd just spend the afternoon there.
While I was there waiting, the place was half empty and they were running these heats for the 400 meters, which is one lap around the track.
And the gun went off, a bunch of runners I'd never heard of start running around a track.
One of them pulls up late, which happens all the time.
He pulled a hamstring or something.
And he's in the lane and everyone else is running past him.
And I say to myself, oh, too bad that guy's out of it.
And all of a sudden a man runs out of the stands and And comes onto the field, gets onto the track and picks this guy up and starts walking him around the track.
Well, by the time they get around the curve, everyone is, you know.
Come on, like this cheering, cheering.
And the man puts...
And it's an older man, and he puts the younger man, the runner, on his feet.
So his heels are on his feet, and he's sort of walking him that way.
And they get to the finish line.
Of course, there's this big applause.
He finishes, you know, like a minute and a half after everybody else did.
So I go racing downstairs, and we find the man who came out of the stands.
And I run up to him, and I say, who are you?
And he says, I'm his father.
And I said, well, why did you do what you did?
He said, well, I couldn't bear to see him...
And I just felt I know I'm not supposed to be out there, but I just ran out there and I knew that if he didn't cross the finish line he wouldn't get recorded in the books as having actually participated in the Olympics.
So it was so important for him to cross the finish line.
And I said, well, why did you just urge him or hold him?
He said, well, I taught him how to run.
When he was a little boy, I'm getting choked up telling this story.
When he was a little boy, I put his feet on my feet and I taught him how to run.
And that's what I did again.
I went back to my chair and I called my editor and I said, I'm not writing about Carl Lewis.
I have a better story.
They said, what are you talking about?
You know, it's Carl Lewis.
You know, you got to write.
I said, trust me, this is a better story.
And I wrote about this guy, Derek Redman, and his father, who picked him up and put him on his feet and walked around the track.
Now, I'm getting choked up just telling you that story.
And I've told that story a batch of times over the course of my life.
But as someone who is very much about children and children who are hurt or weak and taking care of them, that gets to me.
And I don't know how to write that story without emotion.
So if that's manipulative, then I guess I'm manipulative.
But I just wrote it the way that it happened.
And to this day, I hear people tell me about, oh, I remember that story about that guy.
They don't remember his name.
They don't remember the Olympics.
But they remember that a father found his son and helped him in his time of need.
And that's what I look for in my books.
That's what I look for in any column.
That's what I look for in any movie or any screenplay or anything that I write is how can everybody relate to what I'm writing?
I remember that story, too.
You know, it makes me think about you being a sports reporter in Detroit at a very specific time period.
I
The Pistons, I mean, they were just the sports team back in the late 80s and the 90s.
The Tigers won in 84.
But this was also when Detroit was being devastated by the crack epidemic.
The city kind of felt lawless in ways that went beyond what most Americans understood.
And so sports was kind of this unifying force, maybe the one thing the whole city could gather around.
That's what I remember as a young person in Detroit, reading your columns and just being a part of all of it.
And I just always wonder were you writing about joy and about victories in the middle of all of that suffering, with an awareness of the contrast as you were living it?
Well, I didn't write to try to contrast it.
I wrote kind of like surfing on the wave of the city.
And I could feel, because I lived there, how we felt.
And you know, in Detroit we don't mind calling ourselves we.
You know how we sort of felt about our teams and how we felt when they were successful.
How we felt, for example, when the Red Wings won the Stanley Cup and the next two days later they had a big parade and two of their players and one of their staff members were involved in this terrible car crash, when the limo driver was drunk, and they were never the same again.
You know, one became a paraplegic.
And and how we felt about that, you know, and the shock.
And so I would try to reflect the emotions of the city.
But I also would dive into a lot of those moments that you're talking about and those neighborhoods that you're talking about.
Often Tanya.
And if you were there, perhaps you remember I would write a series every winter called Dreams Deferred.
And they would be about athletes who were cut short or had their dreams cut short because of something that happened in our city.
Or, you know, be it a drunk driving incident, a bullet, a shooting, a crash, something like that.
I remember one about this young man who was a very promising driver, high school basketball player, and all of a sudden he stopped coming to practice at the height of his you know success.
He just stopped coming.
And then he stopped coming to school and the coach went out to you know find out why.
And he found out that his mother was a crack addict and that when he would go leave the house the dealers would come to the house and And sell her drugs and she'd get high again and couldn't get out of it.
So he quit school and quit the basketball team to stand on the porch.
And he was only like 15.
And he stood on the porch and whenever they would come around, he'd say get out of here, you know.
And they'd say well, where's your mother?
She doesn't want to have anything to do with you.
He became like a sentinel on his own porch.
So I wrote that story.
I went and interviewed him.
I interviewed his mother.
And I would do umpteen stories like that because I felt that I needed to reflect the city that I worked in.
And that was the truth of the city that I worked in, too.
Not just the you know the piston success or the parades or the Red Wings you know winning Stanley Cups, but the flip side of it.
Let's take a short break.
If you're just joining us, my guest is writer Mitch Albom.
We're talking about his new novel Twice and his remarkable career writing about the questions that define us how to live well, love fully and face the choices and second chances that shape our lives.
We'll be right back after a break.
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You know, you spoke earlier about your soft spot for children, for young people.
There's this work you're doing in Haiti.
You have been operating an orphanage there for like 15 years.
How did Haiti, of all places, become part of your life?
Well, as you know, there was a terrible earthquake in January of 2010 in Haiti.
A pastor came to me and said he'd had an orphanage there but it had been destroyed and he couldn't get down there.
And he thought that all the kids were dead.
Could I help him get down there?
And he came to me because I have a radio program in Detroit.
And I used some connections I had and we were able to get a small plane trip into Haiti just a couple of weeks after the earthquake, when no commercial flights were going and nobody was getting down there.
And Couldn't get cell service or anything.
And we went in, and what I saw there was the worst devastation that I hope to ever see in my life.
People were just—there were people dead in the street.
There were people doing triage, doctors in the street, people climbing on piles of rubble, pulling out rocks and looking for loved ones.
You know.
People without water, electricity, any food.
And we went to this orphanage and it hadn't been destroyed but it had been overrun by people jumping the walls thinking that they were going to bring food there.
So there were hundreds of people mixed in with the kids.
But I was so taken with the children.
They were so joyous and they prayed every night and they were thankful even though they didn't own a thing.
Their toilets were holes in the ground, and there was no kitchen.
They just would eat a couple things of rice a day.
So when I went back I started writing stories about it and I gathered up a group of guys in Detroit.
A lot of people in Detroit work with their hands.
We're good at that.
And I got plumbers and roofers and contractors and electricians.
And we started going down there.
And we ended up making nine separate trips.
But I noticed that the kids were still starving every time we came down there.
They were still just basically eating cups of rice and you know not very much.
And I said to the pastor, what's going on?
And that's when he said well, I don't have any money to run this place and I'm 80-something years old.
And I kind of blurted out, well, I could probably operate this place.
I mean, but I don't want to understate this, because I mean, like this is like a – it's a core part of your life and what you do.
In the same way that you were going every Tuesday to see Maury, you go to Haiti on a regular basis.
You're flying back and forth all the time.
There's a lot that's happening in Haiti right now.
There's a lot of gang violence that's happening.
Just this past summer the Trump administration – uh terminated this temporary protected status for Haiti.
Is this right that you have like 24 security guards to protect the orphanage from gangs at any any given time?
Yes, that's all correct.
Uh, I've been going there for, yeah, coming on 16 years in January.
And, uh, We've had, you know, over 100 kids come through.
Many of them are up here now in college.
I think we have about 16 in college and one in medical school.
In his third year, one going to medical school.
But life in Haiti at the orphanage is brutal.
And I can't even fly into Haiti.
Port-au-Prince anymore.
I have to fly into Cap-Haitien, which is a little town up north about a hundred and some miles from Port-au-Prince, and then take a helicopter just to try to land on a hill.
And how often are you doing that?
I try to go every month.
Yeah.
I mean, the gang violence sometimes makes it impossible, but otherwise I go every month.
And, you know, I look at these kids as my family, you know, and we have a great staff there.
But we have to take armored cars if we go anywhere.
Our kids haven't been outside of the orphanage in over four years.
They have not set foot outside.
Imagine that.
It's not safe.
You can get kidnapped.
You can get shot.
We have bullet casings that land on our grounds all the time.
The other day I got a call picture of one of our supposedly bulletproof cars and the back window was smashed and there was a bullet.
Somebody shot from somewhere.
They're not necessarily shooting at us, but it comes over the wall and goes through the back glass of your car.
And if somebody had been in there, they would have been shot.
You know, electricity, maybe you get it a couple hours a day.
There are days you don't get it at all.
Diesel fuel is... ridiculously expensive.
Water is difficult to find.
And I constantly try to trumpet, you know, this country is just off our coast.
It's an hour and a half from Miami, you know.
And we were in Haiti in the, you know, 20th century.
We occupy or control its government.
You know basically for 15 years that their money was in our banks.
We helped write their constitution.
We have a history with Haiti and we shouldn't ignore it.
And unfortunately not only us, but it feels like the rest of the world, kind of ah, that's just Haiti.
Haiti's always trouble.
But there's so much heartbreak and so much poverty.
And yet the kids are brilliant.
Yeah.
That has to be frustrating.
I mean I'm using the term frustrating, but I mean it's got to be something even bigger, a bigger feeling or sentiment that you feel at this point.
You know, Maury said to you, you need to do more than write a check.
And it's pretty obvious, with all the things that you do, that you're doing much more than writing a check.
But then you're also up against the limits of what one person can do, even with the support of others who have been there to help you financially and also go down there with you.
Well, that's why you try to enlist others to support you.
And that's why I write about it.
And that's why I wrote Finding Chica, which was a story about a little girl who we adopted from.
Haiti who had a brain tumor.
And in it, I tell the whole story of the orphanage.
Um, because you're right.
I can't do it by myself and nobody can do it by myself.
And I don't kid myself that I'm going to be able to save Haiti in any way.
If you can save one little piece of it and someone else comes down and saves another little piece of it.
And these are children.
I mean, we have children who have been abandoned, left under trees to die.
You know uh, A woman picked up a child who was left in the woods crying and she brought him to the police and she said I found this child who was abandoned.
The police said, well, what'd you pick him up for?
Now we have to do paperwork.
Why don't you just leave him there?
That's what we're up against there.
We have children who were left at malnutrition clinics and nobody comes back for them.
They come to us, you know, skeletons, bodies.
We have a little girl that's now in my life who was brought to us at six months.
She weighed six pounds.
She had nothing to eat but sugar water, nothing solid to eat for the first six months of her life.
And we had to bring her to America and put her on this nutrition, round-the-clock nutrition program, every two hours feeding her this stuff, you know, just to try to get her to live.
Nadia is her name.
Nadi, Nadi, yeah.
Nadi, Nadi.
She's the joy of our lives now, but...
She's three years old.
Three and a half.
Adopted her.
Three and a half.
Well, we're in the process of it, yes.
We're her legal guardians here.
Let's take a short break.
If you're just joining us, my guest is writer Mitch Albom.
We're talking about his new novel Twice, his remarkable career writing about the questions that define us how to live well, love fully and face the choices and second chances that shape our lives.
We'll be right back after a short break.
This is Fresh Air.
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You wrote Finding Chica in 2019, as you mentioned.
You brought her to Michigan for treatment.
She died from a brain tumor at seven years old.
And that book, I mean, you're right.
You write in great detail about what's happening there in Haiti.
But it's about loving a child you knew you were going to lose.
And so now you have Nadi, this three and a half year old girl.
What makes you open your heart like that again?
Oh, you just look at these children and your heart is open.
I don't know how anybody can see the look in these kids' eyes and see what they've endured.
I don't know how anybody can hold a baby who weighs six pounds and can't open her eyes and not say I have to help this child.
Or see a little girl who has a brain tumor and you bring her to a hospital and they say she's going to be dead in four months.
Just take her back to Haiti and let her die and not say to yourself no, I can't do that.
I think we're put in this earth to help children and to guide them.
It's the greatest honor of my life to be in Haiti and to have any kind of effect on these kids.
And, you know, it's a gift to be able to Take care of children.
And when we lost Chica, I have to admit I was very angry at God and the world.
I thought, how can you take a seven-year-old, you know, what did she do?
And selfishly, you know, my wife and I didn't have children of our own.
And then we got involved with this orphanage and, of course, we got all these dozens of them around.
But then all of a sudden we had this one who was in our lives and she was sleeping in our bedroom.
And she lived for two years and we traveled around the world trying to find a cure and became a family.
And she died in our arms, in our bed.
You know, we held her as her final heartbeat disappeared.
I remember that.
I remember that, you know.
Like, it just happened.
And we got these two amazing years in our 50s to be parents of this beautiful funny, loud kind of obnoxious kid who was just so charming.
And we got to be, you know, her mom and dad for that period of time.
That's a gift.
And when I tried to look at the world that way and I try to look at our kids now that way, and I certainly look at Nadi that way then why would you not accept that gift?
As many times as it comes into your life, if it's one, if it's two, if it's a dozen, if it's 50 or 60, like we have there now.
It's a gift to take care of children.
You know, I was thinking about how Maury was.
He was 78 when he gave you all those gifts of wisdom, these lessons that changed the trajectory of your life, that has you doing the work that you're doing now and the stories that you're telling.
You're 67.
Is that right?
You're approaching your 70s.
You're approaching that age that he was.
How are you thinking about your own mortality?
Well, yeah, I say that a lot when sometimes people come up to me and they go, Maury, can I ask you?
I go, I'm not Maury.
I was the stupid one, remember?
He was the smart one.
But then I realized I'm a lot closer to Maury's age now than my age when that all happened.
And I am trying to... leave a legacy of the people that I touch because I saw that Maury did.
And I see.
What's important to me now is who do I influence, or is there something that I've learned along the way that I can pass on?
If I can somehow influence people positively, get them to think.
The best compliment anybody ever gives me when they read my books is not oh wow, what a wordsmith you are, or anything like that.
It's I can't stop thinking about what you wrote, or your book really made me think or made me examine my life.
Then I've created a little ripple in the pond, and I'd be very content with that.
Mitch, I've never been able to really tell you just how influential you've been to my life and career and how much of it just a real honor it is to be sitting here talking to you.
Well, that's very kind of you.
I remember.
If I remember right, didn't you tell me once you wrote me a letter when you were younger, when you lived in Detroit?
Yeah, I mean, it was more than that.
Like, I think I first discovered you at 11.
I would sit with my grandfather and he'd read the paper and he was really into all the sports and I would read the sports section and I fell in love with your writing.
And I had a brother typewriter and I would rewrite your columns to learn how to write.
And I would write you, and you'd write me back these nice typed letters with your signature, which I kept.
And I was an apprentice at the Free Press in 1993.
It was their first apprenticeship program.
And the first thing I asked was the security guard, can I see Mitch Albom's desk?
And they took me up to the floor where your office was.
They said, he doesn't work out of here anymore.
He works in his home office.
But you gave me a vision for what my future could be.
Wow.
Well, you see, you've answered your last question for me.
You know, you are the answer to that question.
You know, you're going to be here longer than I am, most likely.
And you're going to influence all kinds of people.
And you're a ripple from...
My stone that you'll create ripples of your own and affect other people.
And that's I mean, I can't tell you how much that means to me.
That's.
That's especially as you get older and you look for some kind of significance, you know, in your life.
That's it.
You're it.
So what a gift this has been to me just to what a thing to hear.
Mitch Albom, thank you so much for talking to me.
Oh, it's been a pleasure.
Thank you for having me.
Mitch Albom's new novel is twice.
On the next Fresh Air, we remember Diane Keaton and listen back to her 1997 interview.
She talked about Annie Hall, the godfather, and how she got her start in a production of hair.
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Before Gwendolyn Christie was cast as Brienne of Tarth on Game of Thrones.
She had a hard time finding a good role.
The feedback she'd always get was the same, and it wasn't particularly helpful.
Because you're too tall and you're too unconventional looking.
And I just thought, gosh, how limited.
Gwendolyn Christie from Game of Thrones, Severance and more on Bullseye from MaximumFunorg and NPR.
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