The last lecture (2 page)

H
OW, EXACTLY,
do you catalogue your childhood dreams? How do you get other people to reconnect with theirs? As a scientist, these weren’t the questions I typically struggled with.

For four days, I sat at my computer in our new home in Virginia, scanning slides and photos as I built a PowerPoint presentation. I’ve always been a visual thinker, so I knew the talk would have no text—no word script. But I amassed 300 images of my family, students and colleagues, along with dozens of offbeat illustrations that could make a point about childhood dreams. I put a few words on certain slides—bits of advice, sayings. Once I was on stage, those were supposed to remind me what to say.

As I worked on the talk, I’d rise from my chair every ninety minutes or so to interact with the kids. Jai saw me trying to remain engaged in family life, but she still thought I was spending way too much time on the talk, especially since we’d just arrived in the new house. She, naturally, wanted me to deal with the boxes piled all over our house.

At first, Jai didn’t plan to attend the lecture. She felt she needed to stay in Virginia with the kids to deal with the dozens of things that had to get done in the wake of our move. I kept saying, “I want you there.” The truth was, I desperately needed her there. And so she eventually agreed to fly to Pittsburgh on the morning of the talk.

I had to get to Pittsburgh a day early, however, so at 1:30 p.m. on September 17, the day Jai turned forty-one, I kissed her and the kids goodbye, and drove to the airport. We had celebrated her birthday the day before with a small party at her brother’s house. Still, my departure was an unpleasant reminder for Jai that she’d now be without me for this birthday and all the birthdays to come.

I landed in Pittsburgh and was met at the airport by my friend Steve Seabolt, who’d flown in from San Francisco. We had bonded years earlier, when I did a sabbatical at Electronic Arts, the video-game maker where Steve is an executive. We’d become as close as brothers.

Steve and I embraced, hired a rental car, and drove off together, trading gallows humor. Steve said he’d just been to the dentist, and I bragged that I didn’t need to go to the dentist anymore.

We pulled into a local diner to eat, and I put my laptop on the table. I flashed quickly through my slides, now trimmed to 280. “It’s still way too long,” Steve told me. “Everyone will be dead by the time you’re through with the presentation.”

The waitress, a pregnant woman in her thirties with dishwater-blond hair, came to our table just as a photo of my children was on the screen. “Cute kids,” she said, and asked for their names. I told her: “That’s Dylan, Logan, Chloe…” The waitress said her daughter’s name was Chloe, and we both smiled at the coincidence. Steve and I kept going through the PowerPoint, with Steve helping me focus.

When the waitress brought our meals, I congratulated her on her pregnancy. “You must be overjoyed,” I said.

“Not exactly,” she responded. “It was an accident.”

As she walked away, I couldn’t help but be struck by her frankness. Her casual remark was a reminder about the accidental elements that play into both our arrival into life…and our departure into death. Here was a woman, having a child by accident that she surely would come to love. As for me, through the accident of cancer I’d be leaving three children to grow up without my love.

An hour later, alone in my room at the hotel, my kids remained in my head as I continued to cut and rearrange images from the talk. The wireless internet access in the room was spotty, which was exasperating because I was still combing the Web, looking for images. Making matters worse, I was starting to feel the effects of the chemo treatment I’d received days before. I had cramps, nausea and diarrhea.

I worked until midnight, fell asleep, and then woke up at 5 a.m. in a panic. A part of me doubted that my talk would work at all. I thought to myself: “This is exactly what you get when you try to tell your whole life story in an hour!”

I kept tinkering, rethinking, reorganizing. By 11 a.m., I felt I had a better narrative arc; maybe it would work. I showered, got dressed. At noon, Jai arrived from the airport and joined me and Steve for lunch. It was a solemn conversation, with Steve vowing to help look after Jai and the kids.

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.

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.

A slide from my talk…

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.