The email appeared in my inbox when I booted up my computer this morning. It came from a college friend on the east coast; its subject line read “Randy Pausch.” I was afraid to open it, and when I reluctantly clicked on Randy’s name, I found what I’d feared: the message contained only a link.
When I knew Randy, he was a college student. We met during our junior year, when, on a whim, I enrolled in the introductory computer science course for CS majors. He was a teaching assistant for that course, and head TA (my boss) when I TA’d the same course the following year. He was also, for a while, my roommate’s boyfriend. Randy was extremely bright, and wickedly funny, and he knew it. He could be quite charming, and, as he would readily admit, he could also be a jerk.
When I knew Randy, he was not yet a beloved professor, or a loving husband and father, or dying of pancreatic cancer. He had not yet become famous in computer science circles, or in the larger world. He was a talented, passionate young man with his entire life ahead of him.
Twenty five years later, as I watched Randy’s last lecture at Carnegie Mellon, and the many interviews that followed, I marveled at what an impressive man he had become, that cocky intelligence and humor blended now with courage, self-awareness and thoughtfulness. His deep affection, not only for the wife and children he so clearly adored, but also for his mentors, students and colleagues, shone through in his touching, often funny, anecdotes. All of the qualities that made Randy an inspiration for so many, including me, these past months, were certainly there, waiting to develop, in the Randy I knew. If only we all grew up so well.
Randy died this morning, much too young, of complications from pancreatic cancer. My heart goes out to his wife, Jai, and their three young children, who had Randy in their lives for far too short a time. As did we all.
We don’t beat the Reaper by living longer; we beat the Reaper by living well, and living fully. For the Reaper will come for all of us. The question is what do we do between the time we’re born and the time he shows up, ‘cuz when he shows up, it’s too late to do all the things you’re always gonna kinda get around to. — Randy Pausch, at Carnegie Mellon’s Commencement, May 2008
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Well said. Randy clearly had huge ambition, ego and talent. Like his “brain fakes” in which one learns something in addition to the ostensible lesson, it seems to me his “last lecture” demonstrates not just how make one’s dreams come true (be born into a supportive family for starters!) but how to share one’s intellectual gifts and passions with grace. His frequent humble asides and sharing of credit (in lectures and on his website) appear less “natural” than a well-learned practice of keeping his hubris in check. That is a lesson in itself. And this is a longwinded way of saying that you and all the other people in his life who reacted to his occasional jerkdom share the credit for the maturing of Randy. He lived much more deeply than long, and may the same be true of us, no matter how long.