Book Report On Tuesdays With Morrie

Improved Essays
My experience with ALS began long before I started to read Tuesdays with Morrie by Mitch Albom. In 2012, my grandfather was diagnosed with ALS. Up until that point, I had never heard of this terrible disease. Being the naïve eighteen-year-old girl that I was at the time, I did not give my grandfather the care and attention he deserved. At the time of his diagnosis, I saw death as something that shouldn’t be talked about. It was a gloomy shadow that no one wanted to acknowledge. My family struggled to accept the situation and I felt myself falling deeper into this conception of what death was. Although our history had been rocky, I look back now with a sense of regret and sadness. These feelings hit me rather quickly upon beginning to read …show more content…
Although these phrases are ones we’ve heard before, it wasn’t until a dying man uttered them that I believe many people took them to heart. I try to live my life in such a way so that everyone feels important and loved. When hearing Morrie say these things, they instantly became even more important to me then they already did. Morrie’s focus on love and community really resonated with me because without people around you that you truly care about life can be relatively meaningless. He talked extensively about feeling a sense of “highness” when he was around others, which I found to be something that I experience on a normal basis. I never stopped to think that those around me impacted me so greatly but I came to the conclusion that whenever I am around others I am happier than when …show more content…
Over these last few days, I was able to look back on that dark time and realize that my grandfather did not wallow in self-pity nor did he try to focus the attention on himself. I was unable to see it at the time but he focused his last six months on making sure he was as compassionate and loving as possible. Although he did not have as emotionally deep of a journey as Morrie, he came to terms with the end of his life in a different way. The biggest lesson I took from my experiences with this book and these interviews was that we must find out what is important in our lives now so that we can later on be content with how we lived. We must make our mark on this world every single day we can because we don’t know what will happen next. Morrie and my grandfather taught me that you have to take responsibility for how you live your life and push aside material things in order to see what life is really about. Now I feel as though I can look back on 2012 as not a year of tragic loss but as a time of acceptance and growth. In the end, all that we can do is love each other and I hope that my grandfather knew that I loved

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