"The Last Lecture"

Last night I was able to watch Primetime. It was about Randy Pausche who is a professor dying from cancer with a wife and 3 very small children. He is the one who gave "The Last Lecture" on Oprah a few months back.





I need to quote him here as these words haunted me as I tried to sleep after the show:

"There is a sadness that comes when I think about my kids and it's not so much I won't get the experience of being a Dad, I mean that's sad but the really strong emotions for me are they won't have me for them. And that's where it's okay for me to say, that's not fair."




"...Someone is going to push my family off a cliff pretty soon and I won't be there to catch them, and that breaks my heart but I have some time to sew some nets, to cushion the fall and that seems the best and highest use of my time. So I can curl up in a ball and cry or I can get to work on the nets."

"The little moments of joy that we have around the house, that's my bucket list. It's how many of those moments can we have?"

A quote from his wife:
"Where we are together and we're holding hands or we're reading the paper debating what's going on, those are the gems that I hold on to."


And this quote from the co-author of Randy's book:
"His fate is our fate but it's just sped up. We're all dying just like Randy is. When we can see him how he's traveling, it makes us see how we're going to travel."

I wanted to share the song at the beginning of this post because he mentioned it on the program last night. I'm sure it is how he is feeling.