RANDY PAUSCH

Randy Pausch, a computer professor at Carnegie Mellon, is dying. He has only a couple of months of life left. He gave one last lecture to his class, which made it to the Internet. On YouTube, alone, it has been watched over 6 million times. Recently, he gave the same lecture on the Oprah show. The audience had the cameras trained on it frequently to show how many people were wiping tears away.



I, too, had tears and asked myself what made me cry. My thoughts led to a very complicated sequence. I teared for my loss of my own husband, seven years ago, though all the while thinking about this wonderful father of three who was leaving his children orphaned long before they were ready to fly the nest. He didn't mention his wife, but I identified with this woman I knew nothing about, as I recalled having to take on raising my own children alone at the same approximate ages from the picture he showed. Already nearly twice this man's age, I am not ready to die and thought about his energy for living and my wanting more of life even though my children are grown and independent and I have achieved much of the life for which I had aimed.

Not once in his talk did he mention religion or afterlife. I do not believe there is an afterlife and speculated on whether he, as I, believes there is only oblivion after death. I thought about whether his children would remember him and long for his wisdom as I longed for my parents' and husband's. I had them around me for so many more years than they will have their father.
I teared at the thought of the wonderful legacy he was leaving his children in this speech and the film they would have of it to watch and how they would always see him as young as he will never age for them.

I remember hospice asking me, after my husband's death, to write down all the things I wished I had said to him when he was alive but didn't get to say. The truth was, there was nothing I hadn't said to him while he was alive. It is things that came up after his death made him unavailable and that I missed being able to share with him. I suspect Randy Pausch's children might feel similarly. They will not be able to ask him to help them solve a computer problem or talk to them about things he had never had an opportunity to share with them at their young ages; things that will come up for them later in life. The tragedy is that all he had learned and was stored in his brain will be lost except for things shared while he was alive, wrote, or any pictures and video they may have of him.

Just as you cannot take anything with you but yourself when you die, you cannot leave anything of yourself but memories and memorabilia.