Alternate+Ending

Alternate ending for __Tuesdays with Morrie__ from Mitch’s point of view (same form of writing with Mitch speaking as in the book):


I looked down at my professor in his chair. The disease was consuming him but this medicine that had just came out was going to slow the progress down. Morrie had said that he would try the medication, but he also stated that it was only so he could talk and teach for a little while longer.

His bony hands trembled as he reached for the pill container, but he stopped halfway there, and his arm slowly lowered as he brought it back to rest on his stomach. Not even asking I reached over took the bottle in my hands and uncapped it before handing the tiny pill over to one of Morrie’s caregivers. She crushed the pill into a fine, white powder with a mortar and pestle before pouring the medicine into a glass of water that she put to Morrie’s lips for him to drink as she slowly tilted the glass.

When the glass was empty, Morrie turned to me and said, "Hard to believe, Mitch."

What’s hard to believe, I asked.

"That I…" Morrie said before he was interrupted with a cough. Able to breathe again he continued. "Hard to believe that I am taking the medicine…"

But it's helping you, Coach. It’s going to slow down ALS. I said, confusion lacing my voice.

"That’s just it, Mitch…" Whispered Morrie, looking at me before raising his hands up as high as he could. "Slowing it down. Just prolonging the inevitable. It’s not being stopped, it’s not being eliminated, it’s being slowed down. Slowed down so I can have a few more weeks, months at best, to live."

I did not respond. I could not think of anything to respond with. So instead I watched Morrie lower his hands back to his lap once more.

"See," Morrie told me after noticing my eyes lingering on his hands, "Just prolonging. But let’s get off that topic. What’s for today’s lesson…?"

The medication had slowed down Morrie’s death for a couple months. His original rate of decay led to an assumption of him passing away around November, but he got to see January of the next year just barely. He managed to see the first week, but he had been slowly deteriorating. I knew it was coming from the last Tuesday that I saw him, he had been so weak and frail; it was unnerving. A normally very active man stuck in bed. At that time Morrie's words of 'In bed, you're dead' echoed through my mind. I had barely held back tears when I left telling Morrie I would see him next Tuesday on the tenth, but something in my gut had told me as I gave him a hug I might not.

Morrie had passed that Friday, the sixth of January. On the upcoming Tuesday he was cremated and buried. The place where his ashes were buried was quite serene with a small, frozen pond and a lone tree guarding the buried ashes of my professor. As I looked at the quite, frozen world I recalled Morrie’s words to me: "You talk, I’ll listen."

I’ll talk, you’ll listen, I murmured to the tombstone with my hands in my pockets as the cold breeze blew and chilled me to the core. Turning around I trudged through the cold and over the snow packed down by the feet of others. A lone figure leaving as the sun started to sink low in the sky, turning the winter-world around me the colors of twilight.

Rational:
The reason that I chose to do an alternate ending was because I wanted to see, from what I know, how Morrie may have reacted to the chance of taking it. I knew he probably would not take it for selfish reasons so I thought, //Why not for teaching?// Figuring that Morrie would probably take it for the sake of effecting others and sharing his life for a little while longer, I let him have the medicine just a little early. At the point I chose of Morrie's ALS development Morrie was able to move his hands somewhat but other than lifting it higher than his chest that was all. This is important because it means that he was, in the real-life scenario, only mere months from dying, so I let the disease be prolonged. This prolongation was almost an opposite of Morrie's character, but it was for the sake of teaching.