Final Assignment on Tuesdays with More

Tuesdays With Morrie
By: Mitch Albom
Publisher: Random House
Year published: 1997

Overall precis of the book: If the author had a minute to sum up his book to someone in the elevator, he would start by bring up what he said in the afterward: the book was by no means supposed to have such a turn out as it did. It's a story that one should hope to prove interesting because it acts as a gateway between the living and death, just as Morrie reffered to himself as. It is also the regrets of a man and his way of trying to learn how to cope with them. Most importantly, the book is important because it was created to pay off the large medical bills.

Precis 2/3 of Tuesdays with Morrie

Tuesdays With Morrie
By: Mitch Albom
Publisher: Random House
Year published: 1997

Precis: Every now and again stop and evaluate your life for 'sleep-walk' living. Evaluate what really means the most to you, what really makes you happy and strive to live without regretful actions.

Quote One: "There is no experience like having children.... If you want the experience of having complete responsibility for another human being, and to learn to love and bond in the deepest way, then you should have children." (p.93)
I found this to an odd thing for Morrie to say to Mitch not because of the content of quote, but because of the answer himself. Mitch had asked Morrie about starting a family, having kids and what that was like and that's the response he gets. It is by no means a concrete or definitive answer. Mitch is indirectly asking for advice and every time prior to this, Morrie has always given an actual answer. 'Do this, forget this, don't hurt yourself.'

Quote Two:

Quote Three:

Precis 1/3 of Tuesdays with Morrie (re-edited)

Tuesdays With Morrie
By: Mitch Albom
Publisher: Random House
Year published: 1997


Precis: Until we are dying or completely dependent on another, we never really learn how to life (read: learn what's actually important in life, of things we will wind up regretting not doing more of.)

Quote one: "We need to learn how to die before we can learn to live."

Early on in the lessons with Mitch, Morrie describes people as living as if they were sleep-walking. They don't even know what they're doing.

Quote two: "Learn to love or die."

I think this is Morrie building off his idea that people live often like they're only sleep walking - not really living at all. We're so swept up in better careers and getting as much excess as possible that we do wind up getting completely absorbed in it. When we do that, we start to push away people we were close to and start losing them. As humans, we need and crave social interactions. I read in a book once about a man who was released from a jungle prison saying that Satre (in 'No Exit') got it all wrong - hell isn't other people. The harshest punishments in societies without actually executing someone include isolation or extreme isolation of some sort. Just as we can be living and preforming the tasks that Morrie sees as useless and insignificant, we can be living and emotionally dying. If we can't love or accept another person, we won't receive those feelings in return or even at all. We will be shunned and to an extent, it will crush us.

Quote three:  "I'm looking forward to being a baby once again."

 In this scene Morrie is talking to Mitch about how he fears  'the day someone has to wipe my ass... the ultimate sign of dependency'. Mitch asks him how that makes him feel and Morie tells him he's going to try and learn how to enjoy it. At first, it seemed like a really strange thing for me to imagine someone saying. I know when I'm really sick, I often don't like people helping me or coming near me because I don't like them to see me in such a weakened, needy state. I know if I was in Morrie's position, I would be absolutely mortified and wouldn't even be able to talk about it. The fact that he can doesn't come across as bravery to me but already as an acceptance of death being around the corner. Morrie knew what would be would be, he couldn't stop it and if he was going to have being fussing and caring for him, he might as well be optimistic about it. They wouldn't be helping him to die but helping him to live out his last days with some more comfort.

Tuesdays with Morrie Reflection

After reading my assigned book, Tuesdays with Morrie, I can’t say that I gained any insights about illness, death or dying as subjects. I did gain multiple insights to some of the characters, mostly Mitch and Morrie, but that right there could be part of the problem. They aren’t characters. All the people mentioned are real people who lived actual lives. The book was written about those Tuesdays spent discussing the ‘most important’ parts of life and most interesting points that Mitch wanted to learn more of. It was, as Mitch says in the afterward, written to pay Morrie’s medical bills. It was much more about Morrie than illness, death or dying even if Morrie fell victim to those. Without the specifics of these topics, I felt that the book didn’t help propel my learnings from this unit.

 I’m not trying to ‘knock’ or ‘diss’ the book and the people mentioned in it. I can acknowledge that the book was written in a certain stylistic manner so that if I hadn’t been told it was non-fiction ahead of time, I would have thought it to be a fictional story until reading Mitch’s afterward. Yes, I did learn a little about the illness (ALS) that Morrie had but I don’t think that was beneficial to our current unit.

I can say, however, that Morrie’s case was most certainly an unusual one.  Had it been a fictional story, I would have said that it was too unrealistic of a read – no one could be so bright and optimistic about dying. (Not about getting better but about actually dying; Morrie’s point about looking forward to becoming a baby once again.) As a general rule, no one is like that. Everyone regrets doing some things and not doing others as Morrie did and some people will try and give their loved ones lessons like the ones Morrie gave Mitch about caring only about ‘what really matters most’ but actually living like that isn’t realistic in this world. You need money to survive. You need a job that pays well and doesn’t put such a stress on your body that you wind up hurting yourself. It’s a dog-eat-dog world out there, as people often say. You need to be better than someone else to get what you want. You need to be willing to step on people to get a high pay, cut throat job. Is it right? No, but that’s just the way things are.

Writing Groups

As of 11:30pm, EST none of my group mates have posted a response to yesterday's prompt. As a result, there aren't any blogs for me to comment on.

HW 21 - first speaker

When we were told the mother of one of our classmates was coming in to speak on her husband's death I expected a tear filled speech about how her husband's death affected her life, her son's life and a constant reminder of something along the lines of "Live every day to your fullest, for it may be your last." I was sorely mistaken. When Ms. Beth came and spoke, the first thing I noticed and couldn't help but continue to notice was that she didn't cry once while mentioning her husband, either of the two sons he had left behind, or how his battle against advanced kidney cancer changed him from the 'Hollywood handsome' man she kept referring to him as to a skeleton that looked like someone had stretched a thin layer of skin over it, with eyes bulging out of their sockets and a hanging tongue. The image she created was grotesque - just as she promised it would be nothing like how Hollywood portrays death - and the complete opposite of trying to sugarcoat something for a younger audience. Just as she spoke of not wanting the doctors and nurses to see her late husband as his disease rather than a human, if not the man he was,  I had the feeling that she was doing something similar to us. She knew our ballpark ages, knew that we were still high school students and quite easily children in the eyes of our education system yet she didn't treat us like children. As Ms. Beth spoke, she gave off this air of equality, something that told me she would use the same tone and word choice when speaking to someone twice our age. In hindsight, I can't help but wonder if the old quote "Death is the great equalizer," can apply to those still healthy and living as well as those dying or dead.


Some insights shared by Ms. Beth:

• That there actually is a difference in the way that some hospital workers will see the patients as (the illness vs the person; ie a thing vs a person)
• How to make them see the person by use of family photos, passing out paintings and artwork.
• Not so much as a direct insight but I noticed that she never was referred to Erik as "my late husband"
• I'm not sure how to articulate it but she spoke about how within the month or so, give or take, how her husband would ask for a bowl of water to put his hand in while he slept. She gave some of her possible personal theories such as the body trying to return back to the womb where it started or to the ocean where life itself started or a still present connection with the water and his last art collection 'Uncharted Waters'. I... I don't even know exactly what to say about this particular quote, for lack of a better word, of hers but I find it terribly fascinating and thought provoking. Do other people do similiar things when they're in the last stages of dying? Wish to return to something be it a mother-like symbol, themselves at their best or simply something that makes them feel better?