Tuesdays with Morrie, Mitch Albom recounts the afternoons he spent with his old college professor, Morrie Schwartz, after discovering that Morrie was dying from ALS (also known as Lou Gehrig's disease). For anyone interested in the study of death and dying, the book is a tremendous resource. When we speak about death speculatively or theoretically, many of us fantasize about living a long healthy life and then dying quite suddenly in one's sleep. Morrie's medical condition provides the polar opposite, a slow wasting away, often in agonizing pain. Albom describes the effects of the ALS later in the book:

His legs needed constant tending (he could still feel pain, even though he could not move them, another one of ALS's cruel little ironies) and unless his feet dangled just the right number of inches off the foam pads, it felt as if someone were poking him with a fork. In...
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