Chapter 3 Course Outline

His death sentence was handed down in the summer of 1994.In retrospect, Murray sensed the omen early on.He had a premonition on the day he would stop dancing. My old professor has always been a dance fan.Music doesn't matter to him, rock, jazz, blues.He just loves to dance.He would close his eyes and move at his own pace with a leisurely pace.His dancing was not always so graceful.But he doesn't have to worry about a dance partner.He dances by himself. He went to that church in Harvard Square every Wednesday night for the "free dance."There were flashing lights and loud speakers, and Morrie squeezed into a crowd of mostly students, wearing a white T-shirt, black sweatpants, a towel around his neck, no matter what music was being played, he Can jump to the beat.He could do the Lindy dance to Jimi Hendrix songs.He twisted and twirled, flailing his arms like a conductor on steroids, until the center of his back was sweating.No one there knew that he was a famous doctor of sociology, a professor with many years of teaching experience and author of several academic monographs.They all thought he was an old madman.

①A black dance originated in Harlem, popular in the 1930s and 1940s. Once, he brought a tango tape for them to play on the speakers, and then he monopolized the dance floor, twisting away like a rabid Latin dancer.As soon as the performance was over, there was applause.He seems to be so innocent and lively forever. But then the dancing stopped. When he was in his 60s, he got asthma and had problems with his respiratory organs.Once, as he was walking along the Charles River, a cool breeze choked him almost to suffocation.They rushed him to the hospital and injected him with epinephrine. A few years later, he also had difficulty walking.At a friend's birthday party, he fell down for no apparent reason.Another night, he startled the crowd around him by falling from the steps of the theater.

"Don't surround him, let him get some fresh air," someone yelled. He was over seventy then, so people helped him up with whispers of "old age".But Morrie, more sensitive than anyone to his body, knew something was wrong.It's not just a matter of age.He has been feeling tired.Sleeping at night was also a problem.He dreamed that he was dead. He started to go to the hospital and found many doctors.They checked his blood, checked his urine, and did a colonoscopy.Finally, when nothing came out, one of the doctors ordered a muscle biopsy and took a piece of tissue from his calf.The laboratory report returned suspected that he had a neurological disease, so Morrie went to the hospital for a series of tests.One of the tests involves sitting him in a special chair, and doctors shock him with an electric current—similar to an electric chair—and watch his nerves respond.

"We need to check further," said the doctor, looking at his test results. "Why?" Morrie asked. "What disease is it?" "We can't be sure yet. Your pace is slow." Slow pace?what does that mean? Finally, on an unseasonably hot day in August 1994, Murray and his wife, Charlotte, went to the neurologist's office, where they were sat down and announced: Murray had muscular dystrophy (spinal cord) Lateral sclerosis (ALS), namely Lou Gehrig's disease ②.It's a nasty, unforgiving neurological disease. ②Lou Gehrig was an American baseball player who died of this disease.The disease was named after him.

There is no cure. "How did I get sick?" Morrie asked. no one knows. "Is it an incurable disease?" Yes. "So I'm dying?" Yes, you are dying, said the doctor.Very regrettable. He sat with Morrie and Charlotte for nearly two hours, patiently answering their questions.As they left, he gave them some information about ALS: a few pamphlets, and it seemed they were opening bank accounts.The sun was shining brightly outside, and people were busy with their own affairs.A woman scrambles to put money into a parking meter, while another walks by with groceries.Countless thoughts swirl in Charlotte's mind: How much time do we have left?How should we cope?How should we pay for this medical bill?

My old professor was struck by the normal pace of life around him.Is the world still so indifferent?Does no one know of my doom? But the Earth didn't stop spinning, and it didn't care one bit.As Morrie pulled the car door feebly, he felt as if he had fallen into a deep hole. "What now?" he wondered. As he searched for answers, the disease ate him away day after day, week after week.One morning, he backed the car out of the garage and had to turn off the engine because he couldn't apply the brakes.He has since quit driving. He tripped a lot, so he bought a cane.Since then, he has bid farewell to normal walking.

He still went regularly to the youth club to swim, but found it difficult to change his clothes, so he hired a home care worker — a theology student named Tony — who helped Morrie get in and out of the pool and changed his clothes.In the locker room, people pretended not to look at him.But they still saw it.Since then he bid farewell to his privacy. In the fall of 1994, Murray attended his last class at the Brandeis campus on the hillside.Of course, he didn't have to go.The school can understand.Why do you need to be tortured in front of everyone?stay at home.Organize your own affairs.But it didn't occur to Murray to give up.

He walked unsteadily into the classroom and into the home where he has lived for more than thirty years.With crutches, he came to the seat awkwardly.Finally he sat down, took his glasses off the bridge of his nose, and looked at the young faces that watched him in dead silence. "My friends, I think you're here for a social psychology class. I've been teaching that class for twenty years, and this is the first time I'm going to say that taking this class is a bit of a risk because I've got Terminally ill. I may not live to the end of the semester. "I can totally understand if you think it's a nuisance and you want to drop the course,"

he laughed. Since then his illness is no longer a secret. ALS is like a lit candle that keeps melting your nerves and turning your body into a pile of wax.Usually it starts in the legs and works its way up.When you lose control of your thigh muscles, you can no longer stand up.When you can't control the muscles in your trunk, you can't sit up straight.In the end, if you're alive, you breathe only through a tube in your throat, and your conscious mind is imprisoned in a soft shell.Maybe you can blink your eyes and move your tongue like that monster in a sci-fi movie frozen in its own flesh.This period will not exceed five years.

Doctors estimate Murray has two years left. Morrie knew it was shorter. But my old professor made a momentous decision, one that was conceived the day he walked out of the clinic with a sword hanging over his head.I'm just going to be exhausted until I die?Or don't waste the rest of the time?he asked himself. He was unwilling to die of exhaustion.He will face death bravely. He will make death his last lesson, the chief subject of his life.Since everyone has to die, why can't he die for what it is worth?He can let others do the research.He can be a textbook for one person.Study my slow and patient death.Watch everything that happens to me.Learn something from me.

Morrie will walk the final bridge between life and death and interpret the journey. The fall semester goes by quickly.The dosage of the medicine was increased again.Physiotherapy has become a daily routine, with nurses coming to his home to help move his shrinking thigh so that its muscles can keep alive, flexing his leg up and down as if pumping water from a well.A masseur comes in once a week to ease the muscle stiffness he feels from time to time.He also invited a meditation teacher, under his guidance, he closed his eyes and concentrated his thoughts until his world gradually became a breath, inhaling and exhaling, inhaling and exhaling. One day, on crutches, he walked onto the sidewalk and fell down on the road.Crutches were replaced by a walker.His body was getting weaker and weaker, and going to the bathroom was overwhelming him.So Morrie started urinating in a jar.He had to hold himself up when he urinated, which meant someone had to hold the bottle for him. Most of us would be embarrassed by that, especially at Murray's age.But Morrie was different from us.When colleagues he knew came to visit, he would say to them, "Listen, I'm going to pee. Can you hold the bottle for me? Can you?" Often they can do this, surprising even themselves. In fact, he had more and more visitors.He joined some of the discussion groups to discuss death, what it really means, and how various classes of society fear it out of ignorance of it.He told his friends that if they really wanted to help him, it wasn't just sympathy, but to visit him, call him, and ask him to share their struggles -- as he always did Morrie was an excellent listener, as he did. For all the changes, his voice was still powerful and engaging, and his mind was still working.He's trying to prove one thing: numbered days and worthless are not synonymous. The new year comes and goes.Although Murray told no one, he knew that 1995 would be the last year of his life.He is now in a wheelchair and he is buying time to say what he wants to say to all the people he loves.When a colleague at Brandeis died suddenly of a heart attack, Murray went to his funeral.When he came back he looked very depressed. "It's a shame," he said. "They said it so well at the funeral, but Ivan can't hear it anymore." Morrie had an idea.He made a few phone calls and picked a date.On a cold Sunday afternoon, his family and a few close friends held a "living funeral" for him at home.Everyone delivered a eulogy to my old professor.Some cry.Some laugh.A woman read a poem: "My dear cousin... your everlasting heart As time goes by, it will become a young sequoia..." Morrie cried and laughed with them.All the heartfelt words were spoken that day.His "living funeral" achieved extraordinary results. Only Morrie wasn't dead. In fact, the most extraordinary page in his life is about to turn.