Comparing Story Tuesdays With Morrie With Lou Gehrig's Disease
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Tuesdays With Morrie Reflection
Tuesdays With Morrie is an interesting story about a man named Morrie with Lou Gehrig’s disease (otherwise known as ALS) and his student named Mitch. The story opens with Mitch graduating from Brandeis University where he attended the vast majority of Morrie’s sociology classes. In a touching celebration of the end of his time at Brandeis, Mitch gives Morrie a briefcase with Morrie’s initials on it. Morrie breaks down to tears as Mitch promises to stay in contact with him, but ultimately fails to do so. Many years later, Morrie is diagnosed with ALS, (as I’m sure we’ve all heard of from the ALS ice bucket challenge earlier this year) also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease, which essentially means the body shuts down…show more content… Before he left the hospital he said something to the effect of, “the only way I’m moving out of that home is when they carry me out of it,” he was a great man, but he was incredibly stubborn. When I saw him, he was weak and frail, really a shell of the man I grew up knowing, but he still had his golden sense of humor (over Christmas break, while he was in the hospital, he jokingly pretended to be dead twice, played with all the light switches over his bed and played around with his moving mattress all while he was entirely unsure whether he was going to live or die) and incredible resolve that no one would take care of him. However, the last time I saw him, he crammed all of the wisdom he could into one short sitting, he said, “family is the most important thing in this world, family comes first.” Another thing he said was, “just be a good person: don’t lie, don’t cheat, don’t steal, that’s all that matters in this life, be a good person.” Upon giving me a few other directions for my life, he thanked me for doing everything I did for him while he was ill and all the yard work I’d done over the years for him. Here’s a man who’s on his deathbed and he’s still thinking about the days that I picked weeds for him. The same man that took me and all my cousins (twelve of us in all) down to Orlando one week a year for roundabout ten years. Here’s a man that until I was about twelve, booked everyone rooms in Destin for…show more content… He whispered, “I love you, be good,” to me between gasping sighs and I replied the same before eventually having to leave. Before I caught the threshold of their house, I heard him say two words I’d never heard him say before in my lifetime, “Goodbye John,” he had always said, “take care,” or, “see you later,” it was right then and there I knew it was the end. My plane got back to Ames that night and I tried to process everything. Over time, my grandfather and I spoke via Skype here and there, but never again saw one another face to face. It was on a Tuesday night when I saw there were two missed Skype calls from my grandfather. I was too busy to return them, there’s nothing I regret more in my entire relationship with him than not returning those calls, because by the next morning, he had passed