Homework #22: Illness and Dying Book 1

Albom, Mitch. Tuesdays With Morrie. New York: Doubleday, 1997. Print.

In Tuesdays with Morrie, there isn't much that I can connect to because I've never had this type of relationship with someone either dying or very ill. However, on page 34, Mitch describes his life as emotionless, technological and boring. He had lost all of his ambition and adventure and was feeling old in that particular section as he sat with his old professor. I kind of identified with this because I fell like my life is consumed by technology and my age has made me care less than when I was a little girl dreaming other worlds and new things to do each day. I feel those two things are connected because the technology is what took all that imagination and freedom away from me. 

"'So many people who come to visit me are unhappy.' Why? 'Well, for one thing, the culture we have does not make people feel good about themselves.'" (Pg. 35) This stood out to me for two reasons. One was that Morrie insinuated that the people who visit him feel obligated to be sad around him due to his condition and this is due to the way our culture perceives death. The other reason was more in the writing style. More often than not in this book, as far as I've read, the author does not put his words around his quotes. By doing this, I think he is detaching himself from the story. Because he is focusing the story on Morrie's life and experiences, the way I read his lines are more of a presence or spirit of the author instead of him actually being there. 

In my opinion, the way this book portrays how people deal with being sick and dying is a type of acceptance. The main character, who is the one dying, decides to continue living his life as best he can instead of getting depressed and giving up. To me, this is a very healthy way of going about dying. I feel that if you don't try to live while you can, you'll end up dying sooner than you wanted to. People who maximize that necessity to live are, in my opinion, more likely to live longer than expected because they tried. In Tuesdays With Morrie, Morrie was the kind of person who didn't just sit there and feel bad for himself. He used is illness as a final lesson and an opportunity to teach someone else about what he was feeling.