The Syllabus
In the chapter, The Syllabus, the discovery is made that Morrie has Lou Gehrig’s disease, a disease of the neural system. Most of the chapter is then spent on narrating the slow decline of Morrie, from the purchasing of a cane, to the hiring of his first caretaker, Tony. Eventually, Morrie goes into his classroom to announce that he may not survive the year. The author describes Morrie as he mourns at home, but makes the decision not to shrink away from the world, but to make use of the time he has left. Morrie decided he would have his funeral before he died, so that the words of his friends and family would not go unheard by him. “He was intent on proving that the word ‘dying’ was not synonymous to ‘useless’.”