TUESDAYS WITH MORRIE: A Book Review

March 19, 2010

                How would you feel when you know you are dying?

                Death is the only true emotion felt in this apathetic world. Majority is afraid of death. It is because many of us were not prepared to reach this horrific yet a natural course of our life cycle. Many of us were unable to fill those lives with meanings.

                We are too engrossed about this fast-paced life, of running after commercial wealth. We are too busy making money, traversing the ladder of our career and being greed of fame and power that we forget to ask ourselves, “Are these really important in my life? Would these things, money and power, I am working for be able to help me be comforted when I am about to die?”

                Yes. We do seldom talk about life so when death nears, our pride could not accept the fact that we lived for nothing, for we could not bring money and power in the afterlife. We are anxious of leaving this world of materialism. And that, we experience fear of the unknown.

                But not for the man I have known.

                And the name is Morrie, a sociology professor who taught me the Literature of Death and The Meaning of Life as he faced and slowly “detached” himself from his debilitating disease that turned him back to enjoy becoming a baby again, a neuromuscular degenerative disease characterized by ascending paralysis called Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS), otherwise known as the Lou Gehrig’s disease.

                Morrie was introduced to me by Mitch Albom, Morrie’s student way back in College. Tuesdays With Morrie, the book, is the final thesis of Morrie and Mitch together. The topic is about The Meaning of Life. The setting is inside Morrie’s house in his study area. Tuesday is their working day. Socratic Method is the data gathering tool. A funeral was held in lieu of the graduation.

                Tuesdays With Morrie is a non-fiction based on a true to life story.

                Anyhow, Mitch was presented to me as always by Ebol, my dear patient, committed and high quality co-writer.

 

Literature of Death

                A wave is coming ashore. As it nears, it is growing annoyingly. It is exasperated as it sees those waves crashing as they reach the shore. Then another wave, knowing something is wrong to its friend asked, “What keeps you worried?” The annoyed wave responded, “Can’t you see? We are going to crash!”

                “Look, we are not just waves, we are part of the ocean”, said the other one.

And the two waves both reached the shore, crashed, and then reunited to the greater body where they belong, that is the ocean.

                Morrie too, was annoyed by his impending death, of how his ALS will gradually remove his independence, and of how will he react when he already need somebody to wipe his ass.

                However, just as how the wave was reminded that it is a part of a greater thing and the crash will open the gate to reach that great thing, Morrie was enlightened that his death will enable him to reach his real destination, his real place, his true purpose.

                Morrie, knowing his impending death, approached people to come and see him. Morrie wanted people to learn from his death. As his aphorism says, “When you learn how to die, you learn how to live.”

 He gave quotations about life and was published in newspapers. Through this, his story was discovered and shown in the television where Mitch, who lives on a deadline -too fast is the only speed he knows, and Morrie’s student way back after 16 years who did not keep his promise of keeping in touch because of choosing commercial wealth after realizing how short life and expecting his’ would not be an exception when his uncle died from pancreatic cancer, has seen him nearly dying.

                Mitch visited Morrie in his house. Morrie, knowing Mitch as a bright kid and being reminded with the importance of his death to reaching his real purpose, taught Mitch lessons about The Meaning of Life every Tuesdays, like as how they conducted their sociology classes way back in College.

                And Morrie was not disappointed. The true story of The Meaning of Life put into 192 pages might seem unimaginable, but Mitch Albom does it all. Now, 11 million copies of this deathbed seminar on life are already spread in the globe. Million lives claimed to have changed. Million spirits admitted they were moved to determine the clarity about life and what it means to become a human.

                Filled with aphorisms, this short read packs an emotional and philosophical wallop.

 

The Meaning of Life and Aphorisms

                “Love each other or perish”

                This is the favorite line of Morrie from the poem written by Auden. For Morrie, love is what has kept him to hang on long enough. Without his family who showed and offered him love and caring, he would have probably died from loneliness. Without his innumerable true friends, he would have probably died without the sense of joy. Without his loving student, the project where he finds his purpose before reaching his end would probably be impossible. 

                Tuesdays with Morrie magnified the value of family relationship as one faces the reality of death. Indeed, family is where you are to open your eyes for the first time and where you are to close it for the rest of your life.  Family will always be there to lighten the darkness of approaching death.

                It also made me remember my mentors who molded me to who I am now and think about how their condition has been from the last time I said goodbye. I was moved to reminisce those moments where my mentor reads me Daily Bread before coaching me for tomorrow’s contest. It made me laugh as the happy memories began flowing from my head.

                “As you grow, you learn more. Aging is not just decay. It’s growth. It’s more than the negative that you’re going to die; it’s the positive that you understand you’re going to die, and that you live a better life because of it.”

                Optimistic Morrie faced the reality of his death with much fulfillment of living his life to be the person he wanted himself to be.

                That aphorism interpreted the statements of persons I knew who wished they were younger, free from the complexities of the life they are living now. There wish to be younger merely depicts unsatisfied lives, unfulfilled lives, lives that haven’t found meaning. If you have find meaning in your life, you don’t want to go back. You want to go forward, to grow and learn more about life because you understand you are going to die.

“You have to be strong enough to say if the culture doesn’t work, don’t buy it. Create your own.”

Truly, popular culture corrupted our sense of freedom to think rationally about what is really essential and meaningful in life. We became obsessed with the real trivialities of life within this materialistic world of gadgets, modern conveniences, and pressures to get ahead professionally and monetarily combined.

Morrie, unlike the living deads, chose to form his own culture of love and compassion. He chose human relations over sitting in front of the television, neither reading tabloid about the latest showbiz gossips nor going inside a movie house.

Morrie listens to you as if you were the only person in the world. His attention is only focused to the person to whom he is talking with. That’s why even already facing the nearing death, he still managed to let people come, see and talk with him. Morrie believed that if we can remember the feeling of love we once had, we can die without ever going away.

 

“Love wins. Love always wins.”

                When you want to do one thing, but you are bound to do something else, and when something hurts you, yet you know it shouldn’t, then, you are experiencing the tension of opposites.

                Life is a series of pulls back and forth. And which side wins?

                Yes. Love wins. Love always wins.

                “When in you’re bed, you’re dead.”

                Morrie loves talking with people more than sleeping. However, as he feels the progression of his ALS, he learns to “detach” himself with the idea of his nearing death. Detachment, meaning recognition, acceptance, and moving on, of letting go things that should and would be happening.

                When the illness affected his toes, he stopped dancing. When the paralysis got higher, he stopped swimming. And when the illness attacks his lungs, he would then come to his end.

                Whenever Morrie coughs strongly that would last for several hours, he would say to himself, “ok. It had reached my lungs. My end is near. Ok. My end is near”.

                Through detachment, he was able to control things including his anxiety over the unusual manifestations of his ALS. Through detachment, he accepts his death is coming.

 

Maudlin Tear Jerker

                Very quick read, like Morrie’s illness’s swiftness, reading the book seemed to go by all too quickly. Mitch Albom made use of proper selection of words to bring out the emotion of the setting generating an impact just enough to move the reader’s soul.

                Tuesdays With Morrie will make you reflect in your life and face some questions about the direction you are heading in.

The Book also has plenty of flashbacks, along with quotes, and short poems.  The flashbacks that where described in the story will really give you a feel of how Mitch changed throughout the story together with the ways Morrie changed him telling him to live life to the fullest, live every day as if it were his last, and to accept death for everyone has to face it.

                I am fond of reading inspirational and books of reflection like the works of Pualo Coehlo, and I have never read a book with such emotion as the one I felt after reading Tuesdays with Morrie by Mitch Albom. I have never cried after reading a book not until I finished reading Tuesdays with Morrie.

                For me, the most melancholic part was Morrie’s lone death. He was under coma for several days. His family slept in shifts around his bed. And when his loved one left the room just for a moment to grab coffee in the kitchen, the first time none of them were with him since the coma began, Morrie stopped breathing.

                Morrie died on purpose. He wanted no chilling moments, no one to witness his last breath and be haunted by it, the way he had been haunted by his mother’s death notice telegram or by his father’s corpse in the morgue when he was young.

                Absolutely, it is a must read to those who will experience death – and those are all of us.