The last lecture Read online

  At 1:30 p.m., the computer lab on campus where I spent much of my life was dedicated in my honor; I watched the unveiling of my name over the door. At 2:15 p.m., I was in my office, feeling awful again—completely exhausted, sick from the chemo, and wondering if I’d have to go on stage wearing the adult diaper I’d brought as a precaution.

  Steve told me I should lie down on my office couch for a while, and I did, but I kept my laptop on my belly so I could continue to fiddle. I cut another sixty slides.

  At 3:30 p.m., a few people had already begun lining up for my talk. At 4 p.m., I roused myself off the couch and started gathering my props for the walk across campus to the lecture hall. In less than an hour, I’d have to be on the stage.

  3

  The Elephant in the Room

  J AI WAS already in the hall—an unexpected full house of 400—and as I hopped on stage to check out the podium and get organized, she could see how nervous I was. While I busied myself arranging my props, Jai noticed that I was making eye contact with almost no one. She thought that I couldn’t bring myself to look into the crowd, knowing I might see a friend or former student, and I’d be too overwhelmed by the emotion of that eye contact.

  There was a rustling in the audience as I got myself ready. For those who came to see just what a man dying of pancreatic cancer looked like, surely there were questions: Was that my real hair? (Yes, I kept all my hair through chemotherapy.) Would they be able to sense how close to death I was as I spoke? (My answer: “Just watch!”)

  Even with the talk only minutes away, I continued puttering at the podium, deleting some slides, rearranging others. I was still working at it when I was given the signal. “We’re ready to go,” someone told me.

  I wasn’t in a suit. I wore no tie. I wasn’t going to get up there in some professorial tweed jacket with leather elbow patches. Instead, I had chosen to give my lecture wearing the most appropriate childhood-dream garb I could find in my closet.

  Granted, at first glance I looked like the guy who’d take your order at a fast-food drive-through. But actually, the logo on my short-sleeved polo shirt was an emblem of honor because it’s the one worn by Walt Disney Imagineers—the artists, writers and engineers who create theme-park fantasies. In 1995, I spent a six-month sabbatical as an Imagineer. It was a highlight of my life, the fulfillment of a childhood dream. That’s why I was also wearing the oval “Randy” name badge given to me when I worked at Disney. I was paying tribute to that life experience, and to Walt Disney himself, who famously had said, “If you can dream it, you can do it.”

  I thanked the audience for coming, cracked a few jokes, and then I said: “In case there’s anybody who wandered in and doesn’t know the back story, my dad always taught me that when there’s an elephant in the room, introduce it. If you look at my CT scans, there are approximately ten tumors in my liver, and the doctors told me I have three to six months of good health left. That was a month ago, so you can do the math.”

  I flashed a giant image of the CT scans of my liver onto the screen. The slide was headlined “The Elephant in the Room,” and I had helpfully inserted red arrows pointing to each of the individual tumors.

  I let the slide linger, so the audience could follow the arrows and count my tumors. “All right,” I said. “That is what it is. We can’t change it. We just have to decide how we’ll respond. We cannot change the cards we are dealt, just how we play the hand.”

  In that moment, I was definitely feeling healthy and whole, the Randy of old, powered no doubt by adrenaline and the thrill of a full house. I knew I looked pretty healthy, too, and that some people might have trouble reconciling that with the fact that I was near death. So I addressed it. “If I don’t seem as depressed or morose as I should be, sorry to disappoint you,” I said, and after people laughed, I added: “I assure you I am not in denial. It’s not like I’m not aware of what’s going on.

  “My family—my three kids, my wife—we just decamped. We bought a lovely house in Virginia, and we’re doing that because that’s a better place for the family to be down the road.” I showed a slide of the new suburban home we’d just purchased. Above the photo of the house was the heading: “I am not in denial.”

  My point: Jai and I had decided to uproot our family, and I had asked her to leave a home she loved and friends who cared about her. We had taken the kids away from their Pittsburgh playmates. We had packed up our lives, throwing ourselves into a tornado of our own making, when we could have just cocooned in Pittsburgh, waiting for me to die. And we had made this move because we knew that once I was gone, Jai and the kids would need to live in a place where her extended family could help them and love them.

  I also wanted the audience to know that I looked good, and felt OK, in part because my body had started to recover from the debilitating chemotherapy and radiation my doctors had been giving me. I was now on the easier-to-endure palliative chemo. “I am in phenomenally good health right now,” I said. “I mean, the greatest thing of cognitive dissonance you will ever see is that I am in really good shape. In fact, I am in better shape than most of you.”

  I moved sideways toward center stage. Hours earlier, I wasn’t sure I’d have the strength to do what I was about to do, but now I felt emboldened and potent. I dropped to the floor and began doing push-ups.

  In the audience’s laughter and surprised applause, it was almost as if I could hear everyone collectively exhaling their anxiety. It wasn’t just some dying man. It was just me. I could begin.

  II

  REALLY ACHIEVING YOUR CHILDHOOD DREAMS

  A slide from my talk…

  4

  The Parent Lottery

  I WON THE parent lottery.

  I was born with the winning ticket, a major reason I was able to live out my childhood dreams.

  My mother was a tough, old-school English teacher with nerves of titanium. She worked her students hard, enduring those parents who complained that she expected too much from kids. As her son, I knew a thing or two about her high expectations, and that became my good fortune.

  My dad was a World War II medic who served in the Battle of the Bulge. He founded a nonprofit group to help immigrants’ kids learn English. And for his livelihood, he ran a small business which sold auto insurance in inner-city Baltimore. His clients were mostly poor people with bad credit histories or few resources, and he’d find a way to get them insured and on the road. For a million reasons, my dad was my hero.

  I grew up comfortably middle class in Columbia, Maryland. Money was never an issue in our house, mostly because my parents never saw a need to spend much. They were frugal to a fault. We rarely went out to dinner. We’d see a movie maybe once or twice a year. “Watch TV,” my parents would say. “It’s free. Or better yet, go to the library. Get a book.”

  When I was two years old and my sister was four, my mom took us to the circus. I wanted to go again when I was nine. “You don’t need to go,” my mom said. “You’ve already been to the circus.”

  It sounds oppressive by today’s standards, but it was actually a magical childhood. I really do see myself as a guy who had this incredible leg up in life because I had a mother and a father who got so many things right.

  We didn’t buy much. But we thought about everything. That’s because my dad had this infectious inquisitiveness about current events, history, our lives. In fact, growing up, I thought there were two types of families:

  1) Those who need a dictionary to get through dinner.

  2) Those who don’t.

  We were No. 1. Most every night, we’d end up consulting the dictionary, which we kept on a shelf just six steps from the table. “If you have a question,” my folks would say, “then find the answer.”

  The instinct in our house was never to sit around like slobs and wonder. We knew a better way: Open the encyclopedia. Open the dictionary. Open your mind.

  My dad was also an incredible storyteller, and he always said that stories should be told for a reason
. He liked humorous anecdotes that turned into morality tales. He was a master at that kind of story, and I soaked up his techniques. That’s why, when my sister, Tammy, watched my last lecture online, she saw my mouth moving, she heard a voice, but it wasn’t mine. It was Dad’s. She knew I was recycling more than a few of his choicest bits of wisdom. I won’t deny that for a second. In fact, at times I felt like I was channeling my dad on stage.

  I quote my father to people almost every day. Part of that is because if you dispense your own wisdom, others often dismiss it; if you offer wisdom from a third party, it seems less arrogant and more acceptable. Of course, when you have someone like my dad in your back pocket, you can’t help yourself. You quote him every chance you get.

  My dad gave me advice on how to negotiate my way through life. He’d say things like: “Never make a decision until you have to.” He’d also warn me that even if I was in a position of strength, whether at work or in relationships, I had to play fair. “Just because you’re in the driver’s seat,” he’d say, “doesn’t mean you have to run people over.”

  Lately, I find myself quoting my dad even if it was something he didn’t say. Whatever my point, it might as well have come from him. He seemed to know everything.

  My mother, meanwhile, knew plenty, too. All my life, she saw it as part of her mission to keep my cockiness in check. I’m grateful for that now. Even these days, if someone asks her what I was like as a kid, she describes me as “alert, but not terribly precocious.” We now live in an age when parents praise every child as a genius. And here’s my mother, figuring “alert” ought to suffice as a compliment.

  When I was studying for my PhD, I took something called “the theory qualifier,” which I can now definitively say was the second worst thing in my life after chemotherapy. When I complained to my mother about how hard and awful the test was, she leaned over, patted me on the arm and said, “We know just how you feel, honey. And remember, when your father was your age, he was fighting the Germans.”

  After I got my PhD, my mother took great relish in introducing me by saying: “This is my son. He’s a doctor, but not the kind who helps people.”

  My parents knew what it really took to help people. They were always finding big projects off the beaten path, then throwing themselves into them. Together, they underwrote a fifty-student dormitory in rural Thailand, which was designed to help girls remain in school and avoid prostitution.

  My mother was always supremely charitable. And my father would have been happy giving everything away and living in a sack cloth instead of in the suburbs, where the rest of us wanted to live. In that sense, I consider my father the most “Christian” man I’ve ever met. He was also a huge champion of social equality. Unlike my mom, he didn’t easily embrace organized religion. (We were Presbyterians.) He was more focused on the grandest ideals and saw equality as the greatest of goals. He had high hopes for society, and though his hopes were too often dashed, he remained a raging optimist.

  At age eighty-three, my dad was diagnosed with leukemia. Knowing he didn’t have long to live, he arranged to donate his body to medical science, and he gave money to continue his program in Thailand for at least six more years.

  Many people who saw my last lecture were taken with one particular photo that I flashed on the overhead screen: It’s a photo in which I’m in my pajamas, leaning on my elbow, and it’s so obvious that I was a kid who loved to dream big dreams.

  The wood slat that cuts across my body is the front of the bunk bed. My dad, a pretty able woodworker, made me that bed. The smile on that kid’s face, the wood slat, the look in his eyes: that photo reminds me that I won the parent lottery.

  Although my children will have a loving mother who I know will guide them through life brilliantly, they will not have their father. I’ve accepted that, but it does hurt.

  I’d like to believe my dad would have approved of how I’m going about these last months of my life. He would have advised me to put everything in order for Jai, to spend as much time as possible with the kids—the things I’m doing. I know he would see the sense in moving the family to Virginia.

  I also think my dad would be reminding me that kids—more than anything else—need to know their parents love them. Their parents don’t have to be alive for that to happen.

  5

  The Elevator in the Ranch House

  M Y IMAGINATION was always pretty hard to contain, and halfway through high school, I felt this urge to splash some of the thoughts swirling in my head onto the walls of my childhood bedroom.

  I asked my parents for permission.

  “I want to paint things on my walls,” I said.

  “Like what?” they asked.

  “Things that matter to me,” I said. “Things I think will be cool. You’ll see.”

  That explanation was enough for my father. That’s what was so great about him. He encouraged creativity just by smiling at you. He loved to watch the spark of enthusiasm turn into fireworks. And he understood me and my need to express myself in unconventional ways. So he thought my wall-painting adventure was a great idea.

  My mother wasn’t so high on the whole escapade, but she relented pretty quickly when she saw how excited I was. She also knew Dad usually won out on these things. She might as well surrender peacefully.

  For two days, with the help of my sister, Tammy, and my friend Jack Sheriff, I painted on the walls of my bedroom. My father sat in the living room, reading the newspaper, patiently waiting for the unveiling. My mother hovered in the hallway, completely nervous. She kept sneaking up on us, trying to get a peek, but we remained barricaded in the room. Like they say in the movies, this was “a closed set.”

  What did we paint?

  Well, I wanted to have a quadratic formula on the wall. In a quadratic equation, the highest power of an unknown quantity is a square. Always the nerd, I thought that was worth celebrating. Right by the door, I painted:

  Jack and I painted a large silver elevator door. To the left of the door, we drew “Up” and “Down” buttons, and above the elevator, we painted a panel with floor numbers one through six. The number “three” was illuminated. We lived in a ranch house—it was just one level—so I was doing a bit of fantasizing to imagine six floors. But looking back, why didn’t I paint eighty or ninety floors? If I was such a big-shot dreamer, why did my elevator stop at three? I don’t know. Maybe it was a symbol of the balance in my life between aspiration and pragmatism.

  Given my limited artistic skills, I thought it best if I sketched things out in basic geometric shapes. So I painted a simple rocket ship with fins. I painted Snow White’s mirror with the line: “Remember when I told you that you were the fairest? I lied!”

  On the ceiling, Jack and I wrote the words “I’m trapped in the attic!” We did the letters backwards, so it seemed as if we’d imprisoned someone up there and he was scratching out an S.O.S.

  Because I loved chess, Tammy painted chess pieces (she was the only one of us with any drawing talent). While she handled that, I painted a submarine lurking in a body of water behind the bunk bed. I drew a periscope rising above the bedspread, in search of enemy ships.

  I always liked the story of Pandora’s box, so Tammy and I painted our version of it. Pandora, from Greek mythology, was given a box with all the world’s evils in it. She disobeyed orders not to open it. When the lid came off, evil spread throughout the world. I was always drawn to the story’s optimistic ending: Left at the bottom of the box was “hope.” So inside my Pandora’s box, I wrote the word “Hope.” Jack saw that and couldn’t resist writing the word “Bob” over “Hope.” When friends visited my room, it always took them a minute to figure out why the word “Bob” was there. Then came the inevitable eye-roll.

  Given that it was the late 1970s, I wrote the words “Disco sucks!” over my door. My mother thought that was vulgar. One day when I wasn’t looking, she quietly painted over the word “sucks.” That was the only editing she ever did.


  Friends who’d come by were always pretty impressed. “I can’t believe your parents let you do this,” they’d say.

  Though my mother wasn’t thrilled at the time, she never painted over the room, even decades after I’d moved out. In fact, over time, my bedroom became the focal point of her house tour when anyone came to visit. My mom began to realize: People thought this was definitely cool. And they thought she was cool for allowing me to do it.

  Anybody out there who is a parent, if your kids want to paint their bedrooms, as a favor to me, let them do it. It’ll be OK. Don’t worry about resale value on the house.

  I don’t know how many more times I will get to visit my childhood home. But it is a gift every time I go there. I still sleep in that bunk bed my father built, I look at those crazy walls, I think about my parents allowing me to paint, and I fall asleep feeling lucky and pleased.

  6

  Getting to Zero G

  I T’S IMPORTANT to have specific dreams.

  When I was in grade school, a lot of kids wanted to become astronauts. I was aware, from an early age, that NASA wouldn’t want me. I had heard that astronauts couldn’t have glasses. I was OK with that. I didn’t really want the whole astronaut gig. I just wanted the floating.

  Turns out that NASA has a plane it uses to help astronauts acclimate to zero gravity. Everyone calls it “the Vomit Comet,” even though NASA refers to it as “The Weightless Wonder,” a public-relations gesture aimed at distracting attention from the obvious.