Tuesdays with Morrie

ALS, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, is a progressive neurodegenerative disease that affects nerve cells in the brain and the spinal cord. It is also known as "Lou Gehrig's Disease". This is an incurable disease for now.

ALS has affected many famous people including Lou Gehrig, Stephen Hawking, Mao Zedong, and also Torao Tokuda, Hideo Shinozawa in Japan. There are more than 8,000 patients in Japan.

By the end, if you are still alive, you are breathing through a tube in a hole in your throat, while your soul, perfectly awake, is imprisoned inside a limp husk, perhaps able to blink, or cluck a tongue, like something from a science fiction movie, the man frozen inside his own flesh. This takes no more than five years from the day you contract the disease. (page 10 in this book)

One day, Mitch Albom happens to know it on a TV news show, that his mentor, Morrie Schwartz, contracted ALS and is dying. He decided to pay a visit soon. They meet for the first time in sixteen years and the class for two, the professor Morrie and the student Mitch Albom, began. The theme is about death, fear, aging, greed, marriage, family, society, forgiveness, a meaningful life. The lesson meets on Tuesday. After the fourteenth lesson, Morrie died, leaving many aphorisms.


A man contracted ALS. We heard it last June. He is the husband of my wife's friend. I've never met him, but if I met him, I'd have no idea what to say. My wife keeps in touch with the friend by cell-phone, but all she can do is listening.

You may be a patient of a fatal disease like ALS tomorrow, even though you are healthy today. If so, how could you live or how could you die with dignity? You must prepare yourself mentally for the day.


Morrie said, "Once you learn how to die, you learn how to live."

Comments

  1. BrookApr 6, 2013, 5:51:00 PM

    Thank you for the good guidance to the book.
    Since I’m sure I’m on the downslope of my life, I’m interested in the terminal stage of a person and the procedure to the death.
    I have been studying the early Buddhism not as religion but as philosophy for almost ten years.
    There seems to be many common ideas in terms of the interpretation of the life and death in this book and the early Buddhism.
    Buddha said that we should always keep it mind that the death is inevitable.
    I added the book to my List-of-Books I want to read.

    ReplyDelete
  2. F HiroshiApr 7, 2013, 11:09:00 AM

    Thank you for your good comment.
    In this book, Morrie mentions Buddhism. Your inspiration is wonderful.

    The meaningful life is easy to say but it's hard for ordinarily people like me. Greedy, desire, envy, vanity, hypocrisy, fear to death, I have everything. It's the matter, isn't it?

    ReplyDelete

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