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Tigger’s last bounceCarnegie Mellon Professor Randy Pausch was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer at the age of 47. By the time of diagnosis, the cancer had usurped his liver, and his doctors thus gave him only months of relatively good health before the disease would begin to take its full effect. Though he “caught a break,” as he put it, and enjoyed more time than predicted, he succumbed to the disease on the morning of July 25. Although pancreatic cancer is perhaps the most dreaded of dread diseases — something like 4 percent of patients survive for five years — Pausch refused to go gentle into that night. He fought the disease tooth and nail, and thus “signed up for the hardest treatments that could be thrown at me.” Nor did he yield to the disease once it became apparent that it refused to release him from its clutches. Pausch used his own otherwise tragic circumstances to inspire millions of others with practical lessons on how to live. Pausch’s “Last Lecture” was delivered to an audience of students, faculty and friends at Carnegie Mellon just weeks after his diagnosis. The lecture has been described as a “romp” through his own life experiences and the lessons that he learned and wished to impart to others. Sporting his Disney Imagineer polo shirt and name badge, both in honor of fulfilling career experiences, Pausch interspersed an autobiographical narrative — complete with photos from the “family archives” — with lessons on how to live one’s life. He shared advice on how to fulfill your own childhood dreams as well as how to be instrumental in helping others fulfill theirs. There is good stuff here. He learned from his football coach that criticism is a sign that your critic still believes in you. The person who has stopped criticizing may well have simply given up on you. And he learned from his share of career failures that “brick walls are there for you to prove how badly you want a thing.” They are there to keep the less determined people out. He discusses the value of gratitude and of hard work and the maintenance of child-like wonder. He emphasizes the importance of helping others and of allowing them the limelight instead of you. He employs the sports concept of the “head fake,” wisely observing that we often learn lessons far more significant than the actual content studied. For instance, one might come away from a youth football league having acquired self-discipline, a sense of fair play, and perseverance. Indeed, Pausch reveals at the close that his whole lecture was a head fake: this talk is not for “you guys” (his audience of 400). “It is for my kids.” Just the same, it has enjoyed millions of YouTube viewings. People are inspired. A friend told Pausch, “You would have been my hero had you gone up there and just managed to remain vertical for an hour.” There is something in this. At the time of the lecture, Pausch was perhaps only two weeks out from learning that his initial treatment had failed. This effectively dashed his initial hopes that he might be among the very few who manage to eke out a few more years with the disease. For me, given the grave implications of such news, something more like a fetal position might have been in order. Perhaps there is another head fake here. Without taking away from the actual contents of Pausch’s parting discourse, the chief source of inspiration, I think, is not so much in what he managed to articulate as in what he demonstrated: courage and good humor and gratitude despite a clear-eyed understanding of the full and frightening implications of his prognosis. A lover of all things Disney, Pausch contrasted Tigger with Eeyore and confessed a lifelong identification with the former. Here was Tigger, still bouncing despite the most devastating news. “I’m dying and I’m still having fun,” he told his audience. Here stood Lou Gehrig, thought by many to have gotten a raw deal, but assuring his weeping audience, “I am the luckiest man on the face of the earth.” Here was a man so obviously in love with life that he expressed gratitude for the gift of life rather than bitterness for its brevity. Randy Pausch was no Stoic. It is not as though he did not grieve for himself and for his family. His wife, Jai, confessed that, for some time after the diagnosis, the two of them spent many nights holding each other and crying together. And you can see the tears well up as he concludes his May commencement address at Carnegie Mellon, having just spoken of his passion for his wife. And he told an interviewer that he went into his last lecture with a plan B — a silent progression through his slides — in the event that he was overcome by grief. Grief presupposes the preciousness of the thing lost, and, in the right hands, is perfectly compatible with gratefulness for having been given the thing in the first place. You and I would likely forgive a man in Randy Pausch’s shoes were he to display bitterness over his circumstances. Surely a good man such as this is entitled to long and fruitful years? But this is just the point. If I believe myself entitled to my existence, then a diagnosis of terminal cancer at only 47 feels like a breach of contract. I will then feel that I am somehow robbed of what is mine by right in the event that the years allotted to me are fewer than expected, and so I will be bitter. But am I so entitled in the first place? A biographer said of G.K. Chesterton that he “never quite got over the fact of his own existence.” Chesterton regarded his very existence as a miraculous gift that is to be accepted with the utmost gratitude and humility. For each of us, the first astonishing fact to be grasped is that we are here at all. Why should there ever have been this thing that I designate as “me” in the first place? Out of all of the merely possible people and things that might have existed, why do I find myself among those things that have the good fortune of being actual? How did I get to play a part in this, the only show in town? It is certainly not by any sort of right. And necessity hasn’t a thing to do with it: my existence is wildly improbable. It is in this spirit that we find Chesterton marveling over what you and I might otherwise have regarded as mundane. He speaks, for instance, of the appropriateness of one’s staring with “religious astonishment” at one’s own feet. “What are those two beautiful and industrious beings,” he imagines one wondering, “whom I see everywhere, serving me I know not why? What fairy godmother bade them come trotting out of elf-land when I was born? What god of the borderland, what barbaric god of legs, must I propitiate with fire and wine, lest they run away with me?” If my very life is a gift, then I should be grateful for whatever I am given. “Blessed is he that expecteth nothing, for he shall be gloriously surprised,” Chesterton wrote. “The man who expects nothing sees redder roses than common men can see, and greener grass, and a more startling sun.” We witnessed a certain gracefulness in Randy Pausch’s last lecture — Tigger’s last bounce. Perhaps that gracefulness was borne of gratitude for the life that he was afforded. The man who expects nothing can find grace even in the midst of grief. [Until recently, Linville was an associate professor of philosophy at Atlanta Christian College in East Point.] login to post comments | Mark Linville's blog
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