The last lecture

by Randy Pausch; Jeffrey Zaslow

  Then the balloon smashed through tree branches on the way up. It didn’t sound like the destruction of the Hindenburg, but it was a little disconcerting. “No problem,” said the man flying the balloon. (He’s called a “ballooner.”) “Usually we’re OK going through branches.”

  Usually?

  We had also taken off a little later than scheduled, and the ballooner said that could make things harder, because it was getting dark. And the winds had shifted. “I can’t really control where we go. We’re at the mercy of the winds,” he said. “But we should be OK.”

  The balloon traveled over urban Pittsburgh, back and forth above the city’s famous three rivers. This was not where the ballooner wanted to be, and I could see he was worried. “There’s no place to put this bird down,” he said, almost to himself. Then to us: “We’ve got to keep looking.”

  The newlyweds were no longer enjoying the view. We were all looking for a large open space hidden in an urban landscape. Finally, we floated into the suburbs, and the ballooner spotted a big field off in the distance. He committed to putting the balloon down in it. “This should work,” he said as he started descending fast.

  I looked down at the field. It appeared to be fairly large, but I noticed there was a train track at the edge of it. My eyes followed the track. A train was coming. At that moment, I was no longer a groom. I was an engineer. I said to the ballooner: “Sir, I think I see a variable here.”

  “A variable? Is that what you computer guys call a problem?” he asked.

  “Well, yes. What if we hit the train?”

  He answered honestly. We were in the basket of the balloon, and the odds of the basket hitting the train were small. However, there was certainly a risk that the giant balloon itself (called “the envelope”) would fall onto the tracks when we hit the ground. If the speeding train got tangled in the falling envelope, we’d be at the wrong end of a rope, inside a basket getting dragged. In that case, great bodily harm was not just possible, but probable.

  “When this thing hits the ground, run as fast as you can,” the ballooner said. These are not the words most brides dream about hearing on their wedding day. In short, Jai was no longer feeling like a Disney princess. And I was already seeing myself as a character in a disaster movie, thinking of how I’d save my new bride during the calamity apparently to come.

  I looked into the eyes of the ballooner. I often rely on people with expertise I don’t have, and I wanted to get a clear sense of where he was on this. In his face, I saw more than concern. I saw mild panic. I also saw fear. I looked at Jai. I’d enjoyed our marriage so far.

  As the balloon kept descending, I tried to calculate how fast we’d need to jump out of the basket and run for our lives. I figured the ballooner could handle himself, and if not, well, I was still grabbing Jai first. I loved her. Him, I’d just met.

  The ballooner kept letting air out of the balloon. He pulled every lever he had. He just wanted to get down somewhere, quickly. At that point, he’d be better off hitting a nearby house than that speeding train.

  The basket took a hard hit as we crash-landed in the field, hopped a few times, bouncing all around, and then tilted almost horizontally. Within seconds, the deflating envelope draped onto the ground. But luckily, it missed the moving train. Meanwhile, people on the nearby highway saw our landing, stopped their cars, and ran to help us. It was quite a scene: Jai in her wedding dress, me in my suit, the collapsed balloon, the relieved ballooner.

  This was taken before we got into the balloon.

  We were pretty rattled. My friend Jack had been in the chase car, tracking the balloon from the ground. When he got to us, he was happy to find us safe following our near-death experience.

  We spent some time decompressing from our reminder that even fairy-tale moments have risks, while the collapsed balloon was loaded onto the ballooner’s truck. Then, just as Jack was about to take us home, the ballooner came trotting over to us. “Wait, wait!” he said. “You ordered the wedding package! It comes with a bottle of champagne!” He handed us a cheap bottle from his truck. “Congratulations!” he said.

  We smiled weakly and thanked him. It was only dusk on our first day of marriage, but we’d made it so far.

  18

  Lucy, I’m Home

  O NE WARM day, early in our marriage, I walked to Carnegie Mellon and Jai was at home. I remember this because that particular day became famous in our household as “The Day Jai Managed to Achieve the One-Driver, Two-Car Collision.”

  Our minivan was in the garage and my Volkswagen convertible was in the driveway. Jai pulled out the minivan without realizing the other car was in the way. The result: an instantaneous crunch, boom, bam!

  What followed just proves that at times we’re all living in an I Love Lucy episode. Jai spent the entire day obsessing over how to explain everything to Ricky when he got home from Club Babalu.

  She thought it best to create the perfect circumstances to break the news. She made sure both cars were in the garage with the garage door closed. She was more sweet than usual when I arrived home, asking me all about my day. She put on soft music. She made me my favorite meal. She wasn’t wearing a negligee—I wasn’t that lucky—but she did her best to be the perfect, loving partner.

  Toward the end of our terrific dinner she said, “Randy, I have something to tell you. I hit one car with the other car.”

  I asked her how it happened. I had her describe the damage. She said the convertible got the worst of it, but both cars were running fine. “Want to go in the garage and look at them?” she asked.

  “No,” I said. “Let’s just finish dinner.”

  She was surprised. I wasn’t angry. I hardly seemed concerned. As she’d soon learn, my measured response was rooted in my upbringing.

  After dinner, we looked at the cars. I just shrugged, and I could see that for Jai, an entire day’s worth of anxiety was just melting away. “Tomorrow morning,” she promised, “I’ll get estimates on the repairs.”

  I told her that wasn’t necessary. The dents would be OK. My parents had raised me to recognize that automobiles are there to get you from point A to point B. They are utilitarian devices, not expressions of social status. And so I told Jai we didn’t need to do cosmetic repairs. We’d just live with the dents and gashes.

  Jai was a bit shocked. “We’re really going to drive around in dented cars?” she asked.

  “Well, you can’t have just some of me, Jai,” I told her. “You appreciate the part of me that didn’t get angry because two ‘things’ we own got hurt. But the flip side of that is my belief that you don’t repair things if they still do what they’re supposed to do. The cars still work. Let’s just drive ’em.”

  OK, maybe this makes me quirky. But if your trashcan or wheelbarrow has a dent in it, you don’t buy a new one. Maybe that’s because we don’t use trashcans and wheelbarrows to communicate our social status or identity to others. For Jai and me, our dented cars became a statement in our marriage. Not everything needs to be fixed.

  19

  A New Year’s Story

  N O MATTER how bad things are, you can always make things worse. At the same time, it is often within your power to make them better. I learned this lesson well on New Year’s Eve 2001.

  Jai was seven months pregnant with Dylan, and we were about to welcome in 2002 having a quiet night at home, watching a DVD.

  The movie was just starting when Jai said, “I think my water just broke.” But it wasn’t water. It was blood. Within an instant, she was bleeding so profusely that I realized there was no time to even call an ambulance. Pittsburgh’s Magee-Womens Hospital was four minutes away if I ignored red lights, which is what I did.

  When we got to the emergency room, doctors, nurses and other hospital personnel descended with IVs, stethoscopes and insurance forms. It was quickly determined that her placenta had torn away from the uterine wall; it’s called “placenta abrupta.” With the placenta in such distress, the life support for
the fetus was giving out. They don’t need to tell you how serious this is. Jai’s health and the viability of our baby were at great risk.

  For weeks, the pregnancy hadn’t been going smoothly. Jai could hardly feel the baby kicking. She wasn’t gaining enough weight. Knowing how crucial it is for people to be aggressive about their medical care, I had insisted that she be given another ultrasound. That’s when doctors realized Jai’s placenta wasn’t operating efficiently. The baby wasn’t thriving. And so doctors gave Jai a steroid shot to stimulate the development of the baby’s lungs.

  It was all worrisome. But now, here in the emergency room, things had gotten far more serious.

  “Your wife is approaching clinical shock,” a nurse said. Jai was so scared. I saw that on her face. How was I? Also scared, but I was trying to remain calm so I could assess the situation.

  I looked around me. It was 9 p.m. on New Year’s Eve. Surely, any doctor or nurse on the hospital’s seniority list had gotten off for the night. I had to assume this was the B team. Would they be up to the job of saving my child and my wife?

  It did not take long, however, for these doctors and nurses to impress me. If they were the B team, they were awfully good. They took over with a wonderful mix of hurry and calm. They didn’t seem panicked. They carried themselves like they knew how to efficiently do what had to be done, moment by moment. And they said all the right things.

  As Jai was being rushed into surgery for an emergency C-section, she said to the doctor, “This is bad, isn’t it?”

  I admired the doctor’s response. It was the perfect answer for our times: “If we were really in a panic, we wouldn’t have had you sign all the insurance forms, would we?” she said to Jai. “We wouldn’t have taken the time.” The doctor had a point. I wondered how often she used her “hospital paperwork” riff to ease patients’ anxieties.

  Whatever the case, her words helped. And then the anesthesiologist took me aside.

  “Look, you’re going to have a job tonight,” he said, “and you’re the only person who can do it. Your wife is halfway to clinical shock. If she goes into shock, we can treat her. But it won’t be easy for us. So you have to help her remain calm. We want you to keep her with us.”

  So often, everyone pretends that husbands have an actual role when babies are born. “Breathe, honey. Good. Keep breathing. Good.” My dad always found that coaching culture amusing, since he was out having cheeseburgers when his first child was born. But now I was being given a real job. The anesthesiologist was straightforward, but I sensed the intensity of his request. “I don’t know what you should say to her or how you should say it,” he told me. “I’ll trust you to figure that out. Just keep her off the ledge when she gets scared.”

  They began the C-section and I held Jai’s hand as tightly as I could. I was able to see what was going on and she couldn’t. I decided I would calmly tell her everything that was happening. I’d give her the truth.

  Her lips were blue. She was shaking. I was rubbing her head, then holding her hand with both of mine, trying to describe the surgery in a way that was direct yet reassuring. For her part, Jai tried desperately to remain with us, to stay calm and conscious.

  “I see a baby,” I said. “There’s a baby coming.”

  Through tears, she couldn’t ask the hardest question. But I had the answer. “He’s moving.”

  And then the baby, our first child, Dylan, let out a wail like you’ve never heard before. Just bloody murder. The nurses smiled. “That’s great,” someone said. The preemies who come out limp often have the most trouble. But the ones who come out all pissed off and full of noise, they’re the fighters. They’re the ones who thrive.

  Dylan weighed two pounds, fifteen ounces. His head was about the size of a baseball. But the good news was that he was breathing well on his own.

  Jai was overcome with emotion and relief. In her smile, I saw her blue lips fading back toward normal. I was so proud of her. Her courage amazed me. Had I kept her from going into shock? I don’t know. But I had tried to say and do and feel everything possible to keep her with us. I had tried not to panic. Maybe it had helped.

  Dylan was sent to the neonatal intensive care unit. I came to recognize that parents with babies there needed very specific reassurances from doctors and nurses. At Magee, they did a wonderful job of simultaneously communicating two dissonant things. In so many words, they told parents that 1) Your child is special and we understand that his medical needs are unique, and 2) Don’t worry, we’ve had a million babies like yours come through here.

  Dylan never needed a respirator, but day after day, we still felt this intense fear that he could take a downward turn. It just felt too early to fully celebrate our new three-person family. When Jai and I drove to the hospital each day, there was an unspoken thought in both our heads: “Will our baby be alive when we get there?”

  One day, we arrived at the hospital and Dylan’s bassinette was gone. Jai almost collapsed from emotion. My heart was pounding. I grabbed the nearest nurse, literally by the lapels, and I couldn’t even pull together complete sentences. I was gasping out fear in staccato.

  “Baby. Last name Pausch. Where?”

  In that moment, I felt drained in a way I can’t quite explain. I feared I was about to enter a dark place I’d never been invited to before.

  But the nurse just smiled. “Oh, your baby is doing so well that we moved him upstairs to an open-air bassinette,” she said. He’d been in a so-called “closed-air bassinette,” which is a more benign description of an incubator.

  In relief, we raced up the stairs to the other ward, and there was Dylan, screaming his way into his childhood.

  Dylan’s birth was a reminder to me of the roles we get to play in our destinies. Jai and I could have made things worse by falling into pieces. She could have gotten so hysterical that she’d thrown herself into shock. I could have been so stricken that I’d have been no help in the operating room.

  Through the whole ordeal, I don’t think we ever said to each other: “This isn’t fair.” We just kept going. We recognized that there were things we could do that might help the outcome in positive ways…and we did them. Without saying it in words, our attitude was, “Let’s saddle up and ride.”

  20

  “In Fifty Years, It Never Came Up”

  A FTER MY father passed away in 2006, we went through his things. He was always so full of life and his belongings spoke of his adventures. I found photos of him as a young man playing an accordion, as a middle-aged man dressed in a Santa suit (he loved playing Santa), and as an older man, clutching a stuffed bear bigger than he was. In another photo, taken on his eightieth birthday, he was riding a roller coaster with a bunch of twentysomethings, and he had this great grin on his face.

  In my dad’s things, I came upon mysteries that made me smile. My dad had a photo of himself—it looks like it was taken in the early 1960s—and he was in a jacket and tie, in a grocery store. In one hand, he held up a small brown paper bag. I’ll never know what was in that bag, but knowing my father, it had to be something cool.

  After work, he’d sometimes bring home a small toy or a piece of candy, and he’d present them with a flourish, building a bit of drama. His delivery was more fun than whatever he had for us. That’s what that bag photo brought to my mind.

  My father, in uniform.

  My dad had also saved a stack of papers. There were letters regarding his insurance business and documents about his charitable projects. Then, buried in the stack, we found a citation issued in 1945, when my father was in the army. The citation for “heroic achievement” came from the commanding general of the 75th Infantry Division.

  On April 11, 1945, my father’s infantry company was attacked by German forces, and in the early stages of battle, heavy artillery fire led to eight casualties. According to the citation: “With complete disregard for his own safety, Private Pausch leaped from a covered position and commenced treating the wounded men while shells c
ontinued to fall in the immediate vicinity. So successfully did this soldier administer medical attention that all the wounded were evacuated successfully.”

  In recognition of this, my dad, then twenty-two years old, was issued the Bronze Star for valor.

  In the fifty years my parents were married, in the thousands of conversations my dad had with me, it had just never come up. And so there I was, weeks after his death, getting another lesson from him about the meaning of sacrifice—and about the power of humility.

  21

  Jai

  I ’VE ASKED Jai what she has learned since my diagnosis. Turns out, she could write a book titled Forget the Last Lecture; Here’s the Real Story.

  She’s a strong woman, my wife. I admire her directness, her honesty, her willingness to tell it to me straight. Even now, with just months to go, we try to interact with each other as if everything is normal and our marriage has decades to go. We discuss, we get frustrated, we get mad, we make up.

  Jai says she’s still figuring out how to deal with me, but she’s making headway.

  “You’re always the scientist, Randy,” she says. “You want science? I’ll give you science.” She used to tell me she had “a gut feeling” about something. Now, instead, she brings me data.

  For instance, we were going to visit my side of the family over this past Christmas, but they all had the flu. Jai didn’t want to expose me or our kids to the chance of infection. I thought we should take the trip. After all, I won’t have many more opportunities to see my family.

  “We’ll all keep our distance,” I said. “We’ll be fine.”

  Jai knew she’d need data. She called a friend who is a nurse. She called two doctors who lived up the street. She got their medical opinions. They said it wouldn’t be smart to take the kids. “I’ve got unbiased third-party medical authorities, Randy,” she said. “Here’s their input.” Presented with the data, I relented. I went for a quick trip to see my family and Jai stayed home with the kids. (I didn’t get the flu.)