the beauty of passing away

 

Between newborn and death, which one that you prefer the most to stand hand in hand with the word happiness? I believe most of you will choose newborn more. I will choose newborn myself. However, after reading ‘Tuesday with Morrie’ by Mitch Albom and ‘PS: I Love You’ by Cecelia Ahern, I did change my mind.

 

Reading ‘Tuesday with Morrie’, I found my book covered with colorful post it for any valuable matters that I might use in life. The book is about Mitch Albom journey in sharing wonderful last moment of his lovely-but-ever-forgotten professor, Morrie that suffer from the lethal disease ALS. Tired sick with Indonesia’s drama that mostly emphasize hopeless action, this book stand as the cure of it all. Pages by pages telling us lesson of Morrie’s life throughout his years, about the world, regrets, marriage, aging, family, money, forgiveness, and some others aspects that we have and should been through in life but somehow cast away by routines.

Take my favorite example, detachment. Morrie remind Albom on Buddhist lesson, ‘Don’t cling to things, because everything is impermanent’. Nevertheless, this lesson against Morrie’s concept of experiencing life, regardless good, or bad. How can we do it if we are trying to detach ourselves from everything as well? When Albom share his negation, Morrie clearly explained, ‘Detachment doesn’t mean you don’t let the experience penetrate you. On the contrary, you let it penetrate you fully. That is how you are able to leave it. Take any emotion – love or grief or pain –, if you hold back on the emotions – if you do not allow yourself to go all the way through them –, you can never get to being detached, you become too busy to just being afraid. Nevertheless, by throwing yourself into these emotions, by allowing yourself to dive in, you will know what pain is. You will recognize it, and finally able to detach from it and walk your life’.

For those who choose ‘runaway’ as their last resort in facing all reality, this detachment story is really something. That is only one, there are dozens more advise that would make your head shook more often.

 

 

 

The second book, ‘PS: I Love You’ is more into some light but yet witty chick literature. The story about a wife in her almost 30 that is just suddenly lost her beloved husband due to unrecognizable brain cancer. The first chapter is telling the funeral story, the reason of death, the feeling of unfair, the memory, and any other stories that might complete any death story. However, unlike other, this story start rolling its sweet endless love tales right after the death of the husband.

After a week of grief, the wife found an envelope consists of 12 smaller envelopes marked with name of months. Yes, in his brief moment of death after the husband was judged to have this lethal disease, he somehow manages to write notes for her wife to be opened each month. Well actually, not just write them, but arrange them.

Each of the envelope bear different message with different meaning that I would kill myself if none of you cry after reading this book. It all started with simple yet personal kind of thing such as gentle reminder to buy bedside lamp just because the husband know so well that his wife is careless and always bump her thigh at the bed every time she tried to turn off the lamp on the wall. Next, more complicated arrangement such as booked holiday packages for his wife and girlfriends, and many other simple and nice surprises. Being not too overwhelmed by the drama, makes the story gets better and makes all readers impatient to wait the notes on the following months.

 

As the conclusion on both of the books, death is reality that you have to face. The lost of someone that you love is indeed hard. However, you do not have to stand hopeless and cry yourself out for the rest of your life. There are beautiful and meaningful ways in making the best out of it.