Having recently lost my mother, I have been reflecting on the complexity of dealing with friends and family who have terminal illness issues and how to best respond to the situation in terms of care and comfort, as well as allowing the terminally ill person a sense of dignity and respect as they endeavor to continue to give and offer as much light from their life as possible. I was reminded of a beautiful novel and play written by Mitch Albom called, “Tuesdays with Morrie”.
Mitch Albom was once a successful sports columnist for the Detroit Free Press. After seeing his former sociology professor, Morrie Schwartz, appear on Nightline (a nightly news program), Mitch contacted him. Upon learning that Morrie was afflicted with the incurable and terminal disease of ALS, Mitch was prompted to travel to Massachusetts to visit him. An ensuing newspaper strike allowed Mitch to visit Morrie every Tuesday for 14 weeks. The book recounts each of the visits made, supplemented with Schwartz’s lectures and life experiences and interspersed with both flashbacks and allusions to contemporary events.
Morrie used the news of his immanent and forthcoming death as a way to reach out to help others handle and deal with life-ending situations. He found joy, peace, comfort, love and forgiveness among the pitfalls, struggles and pain one suffers daily when living with a terminal illness.
Let’s take a look at one of the great quotes from this marvelous story, where Morrie offers some Godly wisdom and Godly truth in discovering and exploring those lifechanging questions regarding aging, terminal illness and death:
“To create meaning in our lives, we must love and show compassion to others. This way, we create our own meaning of life and do not waste our life chasing false and superficial dreams.
Forgive yourself before you die – and forgive others.
When you take, you die; when you give, you live.
Learn how to live and you will learn how to die. Learn how to die and you will learn how to live.
Aging is not decay; it is growth.
The most important thing in life is to learn how to give out of love and to let it come in. Love is how you stay alive, even after you are gone. Death ends a life, not a relationship. You will go on living in the hearts of others. After we die, we live on in the hearts of everyone we have touched and nurtured while we were here on earth. As long as we can love each other and remember this feeling of love, we can die without ever going away because all the love we have created will still remain.”
So as we look at our lives, as we look at how we treat and relate to others, as we look at how accepting we are to some and unforgiving toward others, as we look at how we support God’s church and ministry, as we look at how we put our personal interest ahead of God’s interest, as we look at how we engage in our walk in faith, Morrie stated so eloquently, “Ask yourself, ‘Are you the person you truly want to be?'”
Are you the kind of disciple God wants you to be?
Pastor Mark