I'm currently reading Mitch Albom's book, "Tuesdays with Morrie", and like millions of other readers in the last twenty years, it's forcing me to look at some aspects of my life (and life in general) that are difficult to face.

Morrie Schwartz is a very brave man; facing his terminal illness with hope, and laughter and purpose.  I seriously don't believe I could ever even approach his level of serenity if faced with something like that.  I'm fairly certain my first impulse would just be to start running, or walking, or driving somewhere, anywhere, far, far away and just keep going till I couldn't go any further.

One of the greatest fears of my life has always been that "can't win" situation.  In the 1982 Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan, they called it the Kobayashi Maru, the unbeatable situation.  I cannot imagine what I would do, faced with the inevitable and unchangeable fact of my own death.  To this day, it frightens me to my core. Like most of us, I know I'm going to die in the abstract but inside I know I haven't really accepted it as a fact.  It's always going to be "someday" and someday is never going to come.  Except it is.

The book has really drove home to me the imperative of living with a purpose, of living each day as if it were your last (as cliche as that is by now).  Because it definitely could be.  Most of the deaths in my life were not out of the blue type deaths.  My mother and my brother suffered illnesses of varying lengths and severity, but they had both been undeniably sick for many years.  My father's death was a bit more jarring, having had a stroke in March then passing just a month later.  But Dad had been on hypertension medication for about 13 years, he had smoked for probably 40 years before quitting, and he'd had other health issues, too.  Nobody died in a car wreck or was murdered.

This is not to say that this diminished the impact of their deaths at all.  Far from it. But I just use these examples to show that I don't have much experience with the "your day is here" type of passing.  But I know it happens.  Young people die in car accidents, in war, of diseases.  A co-worker of the relatively young age of 55 find out she had colon cancer in July and was dead in November.  A young man who was related through friendship links developed a terminal brain tumor and died at 22.

I get it.  It's coming for us all.  And Morrie, while certainly not welcoming it, acknowledged its part in the life cycle and was not broken by it philosophically or spiritually.  Sometimes I feel I would be.  I worry that if I got that type of diagnosis I'd just start shaking uncontrollably and crying and never, ever stop.  Or at some point I'd stop and just get white hot mad and stay that way.  I worry that the grace and peace with which Morrie and those like him faced the end would NEVER be something I'd experience, because I'm too unsettled with my life to reconcile myself to death.

I haven't done what I have wanted to with my life, in  many ways.  I have wasted a great deal of it on frivolous things, like many people.  I haven't done harm, in the main, but I have pursued and concentrated on escapism and navel gazing to the extent that I've buried a lot of opportunity to do good, to fulfill myself and build up my community like Morrie says.

And no, I'm not holding up Morrie as some sort of oracle, dispensing unblemished truth from on high.  I aspire to some of the goals he talks about because I KNOW them to be worthwhile and honorable ones, even before I read his book.  I just was very good at burying those impulses under mounds of self-justification and excuses, if not outright laziness.  Morrie's word strike chords that were already within me; it's just wonderful to hear them echoed so eloquently and passionately.  And the man is speaking from the hardest and truest experience possible; he's dying and he knows it.

I'm in my 50's now.  I never, never, never thought I would say those words.  And while part of me is amazed that I've made it this far, and yes, a bit proud, there's another part that understands I'm still afraid of all the things that Morrie talks about.  Societal expectations, failure, rejection, loneliness.  Those are powerful motivators, or more accurately, de-motivators.  And really, if you had a much longer lifetime, say a millenia, maybe we could all get away with frittering away so many years on silly and unimportant things.  But less than 80 years, give or take, goes so very fast.  Morrie, at age 78, did not think of death often, I imagine, before he was given the news.

The book tasks its readers to really dig deep and consider how they want to leave this world and what they want to leave behind.  Money, power, position, fame, material goods?  Or love, friendship, good works, and fulfillment?  And of course, nobody leaves either the first or the second group entirely. We're all a mix, more or less.  But I think it's a question of what we focus on.  And even more than that, it's about keeping in mind the limitations of our  time here and how that has to inform our actions.  We really can't afford to spend years on internet message boards arguing politics or movies or whatever because that's time that we won't likely look back on with pride and satisfaction.

If I think of the things and times in my life where I truly felt happy, there were never times I was being self-indulgent and escaping.  Or if I was, it was with other people that I love.  Washing dishes with my mom, while she sang some old 1940's tune, or we talked about the day.  Sitting in the McDonald's parking lot eating lunch with Mom, talking about our lives, the people we knew, the things we thought.  Watching TV with Mom, again sharing ideas about what we were seeing.  Helping my dad coach Little League, one of the few times we were able to work together fairly tension free, doing something we both liked.  Playing games with them both, laughing in that kitchen, long ago and far away.  All of this was important and fulfilling in ways that no selfish activity can ever be.  While it's impossible to be totally in the moment, totally fulfilled each second of your life, it's great to be reminded that we should always keep that as a goal, as a way of life. Time wasting can become a habit that snowballs into an addiction.

I don't know what I'm going to do differently after reading this book.  But like Morrie, and his voice, and the voice of my lost loved ones, it's going to stay with me.  I won't be equal to Morrie's challenges all the time, but his memory and the memory of his message aren't going anywhere.  Their importance and clarity are born of a true experience and forged in situation that is all too real.  Morrie is one of those people (I won't call him a "character", though that's an apt description, too, I suppose) who really humbles you, and makes you consider the choices you have made (and continue to make).
His gentle aphorisms ring so true because of the sincerity and experience of the messenger, and the inarguable evidence that our society provides each day that it is ill and getting worse. He's given us a wonderful blueprint of how to die and more importantly, how to live, keeping in mind that we all WILL die.  He was a brave, groundbreaking soul and I'm happy that he chose to share his love and wisdom with us. 

I only hope that my death is as serene, and as meaningful, as his.