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.