Blog 12

I came back the following Tuesday to visit Morrie for the sixth time. It was becoming tradition. After I knocked, Morrie's wife, Charlotte- who often wasn't there due to her job- opened the door. She forced a smile, but didn't look all that happy.
 "Morrie's having a pretty hard time today," she tells me.
 Oh, I'm sorry.
"No, he'll be very happy to see you," she said. "I'm sure he'll feel better when he knows you're here."
  Connie, one of his four home health care workers, wheeled him into the kitchen. He looked tired, but he made a smile once he opened his eyes and saw me.That was one of the reasons why I loved my professor so much.
 Today's topic of discussion was emotions.
 Morrie's eyes were closed and his head was positioned upwards. "What I'm doing now is detaching myself
from the experience. This is important-not just for someone like me, who is dying, but for someone like you,
who is perfectly healthy. Learn to detach."
It seemed to stick in my head.
 "Take any emotion- love for a family member, or grief for a loved one, or what I'm going through, fear and pain from a deadly illness. If you hold back on the emotions-if you don't allow yourself to go all the way through with them- you can never get to being detached, you're too busy being afraid. You're afraid of the pain, you're afraid of the grief."
Morrie paused and looked at me curiously. I was still absorbing everything he had just told me.
"I know you think this is just about dying," he said, "but it's like I keep telling you. When you learn how to die, you learn how to live."
 I thought about how this was so true in every day life. For example, if someone in our families have died or if someone you love has a bad disease that's taking them, we can feel so sad to the point of tears. But sometimes we tell ourselves we shouldn't cry because we aren't supposed to. But if we let ourselves cry for a while and let all of the sadness out, we'll feel better. If you let the sadness inside, if you put it on like a familiar shirt, then you can say to yourself, "All right, it's just sadness, I don't have to let it control me. I see it for what it is."
"Detach," Morrie said. "Detach."