Blog 15

With each visit, Morrie is only getting worse. His legs need constant tending, and even though he can feel the pain, he can't move them. He cannot move his head either. Morrie just seems to melt into his chair. Yet he still insists on being lifted from his bed each morning, and wheeled into his study. "When you're in bed, you're dead," he told me.

"I decided what I want on my tombstone," Morrie had said to me. It gave me chills just thinking about it, but I asked anyways. "I was thinking this: A Teacher to the Last."

Morrie always had a way of making people feel good. Whenever I enter the room, he would say, "Ahhhh, it's my buddy." And whenever Morrie was with me, he was really with me, He would look me straight in the eye, listening as if you were the only person in the world. "I believe in being fully present," he told me. 

Blog 14

I held up the newspaper right in front of Morrie's eyes. It read:
 'I don't want my tombstone to read "I never owned a network."

The quote was from the billionaire media founder of television network CNN, Ted Turner. Who would
ever say 'I never want my tombstone to read, I never owned a network?' Morrie and I agreed that our culture had become obsessed with money and materialistic things.
"It's all part of the same problem, Mitch. We put our values in the wrong things," he told me.
 He looked out the window at the hibiscus plant on the window sill. "We've got a form of brainwashing
going on in our country. Do you know how they brainwash people? They repeat something over and over. That's what we do in this country. We believe that owning things is good. More property is good. More money is good. More is good, more is good. The average person is so fogged up on all this, he has
no perspective on what's really important anymore."
 I was listening to Morrie like a little kid was to his parent who was reading him an intriguing story. Morrie had that gift. When he was talking, everyone would want to listen because he had so
much knowledge. So much knowledge of things we never thought about half the time.
 Morrie told me how 'money is not a substitute for tenderness, and power is not a substitute for tenderness.' I look around Morrie's study. I see stacks of books on the shelves and papers piled like a mountain on his desk. Not much had changed since the first day I came. And then I started thinking. Why are people so caught up in things that don't really matter? Like phones, the latest iPad or the coolest car that they're always hearing about. In Morrie's case, he was dying, but he was enjoying every day of his life as if it was his last day on Earth. He had never cared about electronics or sports cars or anything that all of us students thought were the most important things.
  'The truth is, you don't get satisfaction from those things. You know what really gives you satisfaction?"
What? I asked him.
 "Offering others what you have to give. Devote yourself to loving others, devote yourself to your community around you, and devote yourself to creating something that gives you purpose and meaning.
You notice," he added, smiling widely, "there's nothing in there about a salary."

Blog 13

The Morrie I knew, the Morrie so many others knew, would have not been the man he was without the years he spent working at a mental hospital. This was one of Morrie's first jobs after a master's degree and a Ph.D. from University of Chicago. Morrie was given a grant to observe the patients and record their treatments. Morrie saw patients who would scram all day. Patients who would cry all night, soil their underwear, refused to eat, having to be held down, and medicated.Morrie would watch in horror, when one patient who was a middle-aged woman, would come out of her room everyday and lye face down on the tile floor. She would stay there for hours as doctor and nurses would step around her. Morrie took notes which he was there to do. Every day she would do this. It saddened Morrie. He began to sit with her, even lay down alongside her. What she mostly wanted was for someone to notice that she was there. He would befriended some of the patients. One of the lessons Morrie would never forget was that the patients were well-off, from rich families, so their wealth did not buy them happiness or contentment.
One time a group of black students took over Ford Hall on the Brandeis campus. Ford Hall had chemistry labs. One of the administration officials worried that the students were making bombs in the basement. Morrie saw right through the core of the problem, was that human beings wanting to feel that they mattered. The standoff lasted for weeks. It might have went on longer if Morrie hadn't been walking by the building and one of the protesters noticed him as one of his favorite teacher. Morrie always made good peace.
The seventh Tuesday. Morrie lost his battle. Someone was now wiping his behind. The most personal and basic things had been taken away from him, washing his private, going to the bathroom and blowing his nose. He was dependent on others for nearly everything. At seventy-eight, he was giving as an adult and taking as a child. We talked about aging and the fear of aging. On my ride form the Boston Airport I saw billboards with beautiful and young people that barely passed the thirty-five. I told Morrie I was already feeling over the hill as much I tried my best to stay on top of it. I worked out constantly, watched what I ate. I had gone from being proud to say my age, to not bringing it up. "Listen. You should know something. All younger people should know something. If you're always battling against getting older, you're always going to be unhappy." Morrie told me.

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."

Blog 11

It is Septemeber now. We switched from the handheld microphones to the clip on kind. It is too difficult for him to hold anything for very long. Each visit, he seemed to be getting worse. We talked about family that day. I remember him telling me, "love each other or perish." I wrote it down, actually. Family is always watching out for you. That was another thing he told me. Nothing else can give you that. Not money, not fame, not work. Morrie asked me about my brother, Peter. I quickly changed the subject though. Peter is two years younger than me. We had never been particulary close. But when we became adults, we grew even further apart. He was struck with pancreas cancer. It is a rare kind. The kind my uncle died from. I always thought it would be me to get it, not him. It was suppose to be me. Peter moved to Europe, not long after he graduated high school.He stayed there to get treatment. But he didn't want me around. Not me, not anyone else either. Months sometimes passed, without any word from him. I felt so guilty. I should be there for him...but he was the one who pushed me away. Maybe that was why I was drawn to Morrie. He let me be there, unlike Peter. And maybe Morrie knew this.

Blog 10

Tuesday number four, and Morrie is getting worse by the week. When I walked into his house four , I immediately noticed the newest feature of Morrie's house, an oxygen machine. Today's topic of discussion was death, and fear of dying. Morrie explained how everyone knew they were going to die, but nobody really believed it. You never really believe that you won't be in the world one day and that it will just go on spinning with, or without you. "The truth is Mitch," he said, "Is that once you learn how to die, you learn how to live." Rob and Jon, Morrie's sons had the sunday before, to help him. answer fan mail from all of the people who had seen him on "Nightline". Morrie couldn't write the letters himself, because his fingers couldn't handle holding the pen. The ALS continued.

Blog 9

This was the third Tuesday Ive spent with Morrie so far. Today was a little differant though, because I brought a tape recorder with me. I want to still be able to have Morrie's voice with me, even after he's dead. I asked him questions that I had been wanting to ask him since I saw him on that Nightline interview, aboutwhat he regreted never having done before he got sick. He told me that we are all trained not to worry about little things until we know we are going to die, that wwe all have trillions of little tasks going on around us, and that sometimes, while we still can, we have to step back, look at our lives, and say Is anything missing?. Today was also the day that I decided to write down all the topics I wanted to talk to Morrie about on a yellow legal pad.