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Tuesdays With Morrie

Decent Essays

Morrie’s Message If you only had a few months left to live due to a disease how would you choose to live? Would you let it take control of you and wither away, or would you make the most out of your final days by doing all you could? In the novel Tuesdays with Morrie, Mitch Albom gains a new understanding of life’s greatest lessons through his dying professor’s, Morrie Schwartz, eyes. This book helped open my eyes as well and realize what is truly important in your life and the things you should make a priority. Between our textbook, Social Gerontology, and the novel, Tuesday’s with Morrie, they both touched a lot of important key points of aging and what a person is ultimately faced with as they are nearing their death. The top three …show more content…

A topic that both the textbook and novel touched on that I think is the most valuable in a person’s life is family. I think this is the most valuable topic because if a person does not have a family then they do not have anything. To be happy in life you need other individuals to enjoy activities and life in general with. Material objects can make someone happy, but they do not share the value that an actual relationship with a person can have. Family is the foundation of a support system that everyone needs. Morrie states “If you don’t have the support and love and caring and concern that you get from a family, you don’t have much at all. Love is so supremely important.”(Albom, 91) This statement is very true, you get support, care, love, and concern from family members and if there is no one there for you then you do not have any of these. Morrie then goes on and makes the comment “Without love, …show more content…

Every day a person experiences different emotions. The key to experiencing emotions is how one chooses to handle them and how they display themselves. In our textbook it mentions Elizabeth Kubler- Ross’ process of dying and this deals with the emotions people are faced with when it comes to dying and how they cope with them. Ross’s first stage is shock and denial and in the novel Morrie displays shock and denial when the doctor initially told him he has Lou Gehrig’s disease. “My old professor, meanwhile, was stunned by the normalcy of the day around him. Shouldn’t the world stop? Don’t they know what has happened to me?” (Albom, 8) As Morrie faces each of the five stages he finally reaches the last one which is acceptance and adjustment. He explains to Mitch the process of detaching oneself and all the emotions one will face. “If you hold back on the emotions- if you don’t allow yourself to go all the way through them- you can never get to being detached, you’re too busy being afraid…” “But by throwing yourself into these emotions, by allowing yourself to dive in, all the way, over your head even, you experience them fully and completely. You know what pain is. You know what love is. You know what grief is. And only then can you say, ‘All right, I have experienced that emotion. I recognize that emotion. Now I need to detach from that emotion for a moment” (Albom,

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