The Last Lecture
I finished reading "The Last Lecture" by Randy Pausch tonight. I picked this up at the bookstore a couple weeks back when I was searching for something to help me deal with the rapidly declining situation in my life. In case you're unaware, Pausch was a professor at Carnegie Mellon who was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. The book is about his "last lecture"; a study not just on achieving childhood dreams, but also about leaving a message to his (very) young children before he died.
The book is something of an owner's manual for life. Living it to the fullest, embracing adversity, and leaving your mark in the ones you leave behind. Because you never know when that might happen. Throughout the book, Pausch never falls victim to maudlin self-pity. The book is full of advice, personal story after story, and obvious love for his family.
The last 10 pages hit me very hard, as he talked about the inevitability of his children growing up without him. The current separation from my kids due to work is certainly nowhere near being dead, but that doesn't make it any easier. My boy got his first "wiggly tooth" yesterday and I had to see it on a webcam. He's scared by this and I'm not there to tell him it's ok. His birthday is Oct. 3 and I will miss it for over a week due to a product release. Halloween (my favorite holiday) is coming, and there's a very real chance I could miss that. No, I'm not dead yet, but it sure feels like it at times.
It's a great book and well worth the read. While in the middle of it, I heard that the Pausch succumbed to his cancer in late July. It certainly changed the tone for me and I spent much more time studying the few photos in the book. This was now the record of a dead man telling a living one how to deal with the worst of situations. One thing that struck me is when he said he was lucky to have gotten cancer instead of being hit by a bus. It gave him time to put into this lecture a (hopefully) lifetime of messages for his family. The bus doesn't give you that option.
My father was diagnosed with cancer in Sept. 1991. He never recovered from the exploratory surgery and languished in a narcotic-induced delirium until he died the following month. Just like that, he was gone. At the end, he made one attempt to tell us that he loved us. He asked all of us to put our hands out and close our eyes. He weakly told us that was going to touch the hand of the one he "loved the most". He then tried to touch all of our hands but didn't have the strength to do it. That's all I got from the end of my father's life. I am sure that Pausch's children will read what he left and appreciate it.
If you want to learn more about the book, you can visit the website at www.lastlecture.com.
The book is something of an owner's manual for life. Living it to the fullest, embracing adversity, and leaving your mark in the ones you leave behind. Because you never know when that might happen. Throughout the book, Pausch never falls victim to maudlin self-pity. The book is full of advice, personal story after story, and obvious love for his family.
The last 10 pages hit me very hard, as he talked about the inevitability of his children growing up without him. The current separation from my kids due to work is certainly nowhere near being dead, but that doesn't make it any easier. My boy got his first "wiggly tooth" yesterday and I had to see it on a webcam. He's scared by this and I'm not there to tell him it's ok. His birthday is Oct. 3 and I will miss it for over a week due to a product release. Halloween (my favorite holiday) is coming, and there's a very real chance I could miss that. No, I'm not dead yet, but it sure feels like it at times.
It's a great book and well worth the read. While in the middle of it, I heard that the Pausch succumbed to his cancer in late July. It certainly changed the tone for me and I spent much more time studying the few photos in the book. This was now the record of a dead man telling a living one how to deal with the worst of situations. One thing that struck me is when he said he was lucky to have gotten cancer instead of being hit by a bus. It gave him time to put into this lecture a (hopefully) lifetime of messages for his family. The bus doesn't give you that option.
My father was diagnosed with cancer in Sept. 1991. He never recovered from the exploratory surgery and languished in a narcotic-induced delirium until he died the following month. Just like that, he was gone. At the end, he made one attempt to tell us that he loved us. He asked all of us to put our hands out and close our eyes. He weakly told us that was going to touch the hand of the one he "loved the most". He then tried to touch all of our hands but didn't have the strength to do it. That's all I got from the end of my father's life. I am sure that Pausch's children will read what he left and appreciate it.
If you want to learn more about the book, you can visit the website at www.lastlecture.com.
posted by Mkae at
10:28 PM
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