Dream New Dreams

by Jai Pausch

  Almost all of us have childhood dreams; for example, being an astronaut, or making movies or video games for a living. Sadly, most people don’t achieve theirs, and I think that’s a shame. I had several specific childhood dreams, and I’ve actually achieved most of them. More important, I have found ways … of helping many young people actually achieve their childhood dreams.

  As his idea became clearer, he explained to me that he could see the role his childhood dreams had played in his life and the many lessons he gained from the resulting experiences. Moreover, he realized the powerful emotional return he got from helping his students and others realize their own dreams. It was an amazing fifteen-minute discussion, in which he talked to me and typed up his thoughts, for I got to watch how his brain worked and how he pulled these pieces together for the bones of his lecture. Directly afterward, we were called back into the examining room, where the doctor and pathologist confirmed that the tumors in Randy’s liver were metastatic pancreatic cancer. With that confirmation, we knew he would die from the disease. The abstract he had just written a half hour before would literally be his last lecture.

  Carnegie Mellon University did not bill Randy’s talk in its Journeys lecture series as his last lecture nor promote the fact that he had terminal cancer. But everybody knew because of the blog Randy kept about his health status and because he was a popular professor. The university community had been interested and caring about his condition from the start. That interest hadn’t waned; rather, it had increased over the twelve months he had been battling the disease. The university organizer had reserved the main auditorium for Randy’s lecture in anticipation of a large crowd. Not only did the university advertise the lecture on campus, but it also contacted Randy’s former students, colleagues at other universities, and collaborators from industry. Still, Randy didn’t think there would be enough bodies to fill all 450 seats. Without our knowing it, word of mouth carried the news about Randy’s lecture far and wide. The university also worked with Brown University and the University of North Carolina–Chapel Hill, to have the lecture streamed over the Internet to their computer science departments.

  While the university was preparing for Randy’s lecture, Randy and I were moving our family from Pittsburgh to Chesapeake, Virginia, to be closer to my family. Randy would help unpack the house for a while, then go work on his talk on his computer. He scanned tons of photographs and made slide after slide for his PowerPoint presentation. Randy would use a picture or some bulleted points on a slide when he gave a talk. He never wrote out exactly what he would say, but rather he would look at each slide and continue his talk smoothly as if it were written out in his head. Standing in front of hundreds of people, he never lost his poise or his place in the talk. As he composed it, I became a sounding board, listening to him try out a variety of stories told in a multitude of ways. One story in particular stands out to me. He told me about a difficult academic administrator with whom he had butted heads. He was going to use the man’s real name. I suggested he call the man Dean Wormer, after the villainous academic dean in the movie Animal House, as a comic alternative. Randy liked my suggestion and used it in his talk. I was curious to see how all his stories would come together in the final lecture; I had only heard the talk in fragments, not from beginning to end.

  By the time Randy was preparing to leave Virginia for Pittsburgh, he had amassed over three hundred slides. In addition, he had carefully thought out stage props, like stuffed animals, costumes, and his Imagineering shirt, for maximum effect. He was a master speaker who had a magical way of connecting with his audience. Randy was constantly moving slides around and deleting slides, so that the talk was always a work in progress. Deep down inside, I really wanted to hear the finished product, but our recent move and disheveled house were screaming at me. I knew he would do a great job, but I had been to a couple of these lectures before; usually there would be a small group of the speaker’s friends, his students, and maybe some other professors who would attend. I wasn’t anticipating that his lecture would be that different.

  It was hard for me to justify leaving the children after we had moved just a few weeks earlier. For the past ten days, I had unpacked most of the boxes and figured out where to put things and how to organize our new home, while Randy scanned photograph after photograph to illustrate the points in his presentation. We were looking for a preschool for Logan, having missed the enrollment period and finding it difficult to locate a program with an available space. Chloe was still too young for preschool, which meant I needed to find child care for her so I could continue to assist Randy in a meaningful way. In addition, our house was in chaos, reflecting my own chaotic state of mind, and was enormously distracting. Boxes were piled up in the dining room and garage.

  Friends and family came to help us unpack. Randy’s sister Ruby and her husband, Brian, postponed their move to China and instead came to Virginia to help with the children and opening boxes. While we all settled in, Randy continued to pursue palliative chemotherapy. We found a local oncologist, Michael Lee, who was willing to collaborate with us and our oncologist in Houston.

  At the same time, I began the process of looking for a nanny to help me care for the children. Our Pittsburgh nanny and angel, Laura O’Malley, had offered to stay with us for a few weeks while we looked for someone local to help us. The children loved Laura and her dog, Floyd. She had an amazing way of getting them to behave or pick up their toys by making up games to entice them. But it was unreasonable to impose on her kindness for much longer. Finding someone to replace her seemed next to impossible, but we learned about a young woman who was looking to change careers and might be willing to help us until she figured out what she wanted to do next in her life. That woman was Rachel Paige, who turned out to be one of the kindest and gentlest people I’ve ever met. Our children took to her immediately and, like Laura, Rachel became a member of our family.

  Even with all the help from our friends and family, I was still reeling with the sudden change of course our lives had taken. I wanted to hunker down, live these last few months with Randy while he was still feeling well, and wall off the outside world with its demands on his time and attention. I wanted us to create memories for our children to hold on to for a lifetime. Nothing else mattered, in my opinion. Nothing. But my husband didn’t see the end of his life playing out like that. He wasn’t willing to stay at home and die quietly. He still had more living to do.

  I was faced with a difficult decision once again. I recognized this was a seminal event for Randy, regardless of how many people came to hear him or what the status of our new house was. But the tugs to get our lives organized, to get our kids into a routine and help them settle into their new surroundings, and to be together as a family were compelling arguments to stay at home. Randy and I found a compromise: he would travel up to Pittsburgh the day before the event and I would follow him on the morning of it. We would stay just one night and be on the first flight next day.

  On the morning of September 18, 2007, I remember looking out the taxicab window, recognizing some of the people walking down Forbes Avenue as I went to meet Randy and his friend for lunch at his favorite restaurant, Il Valletto, which was within walking distance of the university. When I first saw him, I could immediately tell he was exhausted. He explained to me that he had stayed up all night fiddling with the slides’ order, rearranging the stories and the way the lecture would unfold. I was concerned that he wouldn’t have the physical energy to stand up for an hour. So immediately after lunch, we headed back to campus and borrowed an office with a couch where Randy lay down to rest before show time.

  After he was comfortable, my husband shooed me away to go have coffee with some old colleagues, assuring me he would be fine and would see me in the auditorium. I’d known Randy long enough to know he wanted some time to think. He stretched his six-foot frame out on the office couch, looking drained. Shaking my head, I shut the door and thought that Randy was pushing himself to the breakin
g point. I asked myself why he was doing this—choosing to give so much of himself to a gathering of thirty people? We had been joking about the number of people who would attend. Cleah Schleuter, the behind-the-scenes logistical organizer, kept assuring Randy he would be speaking to a full house not only in Pittsburgh, but to several university computer science departments as well.

  So my surprise was twofold when I arrived at the University Center’s auditorium. First, the line to get in to see the lecture snaked down the long hallway, into the lobby, and out the door. Cleah saw me and allowed me to enter the auditorium while everyone else waited until the doors opened. As I descended the steps toward the front rows, I could see VIPs already in their seats. They included former students, some of whom had flown in from California; professors from Carnegie Mellon, the University of Virginia, Brown, and the University of North Carolina–Chapel Hill; and colleagues with whom Randy had worked, including those from the Walt Disney Company and Electronic Arts. Randy had worked for Walt Disney Imagineering Virtual Reality Studio in 1995 and with Electronic Arts in 2006. Not only was there a body in every seat, but there were others on the steps inside the hall. Randy’s lecture was being broadcast on campus, and additional rooms were full as well.

  My second surprise came when Randy stepped out onto the stage. He didn’t look exhausted or enervated, as he had been just an hour earlier. Instead, he looked … normal—a regular professor getting ready to give a talk. He fiddled with props and cables and looked intently at his computer for an equipment check. But I did notice that he didn’t make eye contact with the audience. He didn’t say hello to friends or acknowledge my presence in the front row. I read his actions as nervousness. Maybe he felt pressured to give a magnum opus with his undergraduate mentor, Dr. Andy Van Dam, present in a full house. Maybe the reality of the moment—that this would be the last time he would stand on a stage (as far as he knew) and do the thing he loved to do—weighed on his heart. But whatever it was, he tucked it away along with any lingering doubts he might have had. Randy finished his computer check and walked off the stage until it was time to begin.

  After his friend and colleague Steve Seabolt of Electronic Arts introduced Randy, my husband stepped onto the stage and the magic began. It was wonderful to see him reinvigorated, his wit sharp, with his dark, cutting humor, his little smirk, his smiles. Where did he get that energy? A couple of hours earlier, he had lain on the couch in the office looking as though he needed to sleep for a week, and yet here he was, doing push-ups! What a gift Randy gave that day, in that hour, for all of us to receive. But he gained so much in return. I was so happy for him to get to realize his dream and give the lecture. From my seat, I could watch Randy enjoy his role as lecturer and see the audience’s reaction to his stories and lessons.

  It caught me completely off guard when Cleah rolled out a birthday cake. Randy said one of his dreams was to make other people happy and talked about how important it was to recognize the sacrifices of other people who helped us achieve our goals. He had had to leave early on my birthday, and he wanted to publicly acknowledge the time with him that I had given up in order for him to be here on this stage. Then Randy, along with the hundreds of people in the audience, sang “Happy Birthday” to me. In that moment, my heart overflowed with emotion for the man who made my life so wonderful and shared a love that was bigger than I had ever experienced. Yet at the same time, my heart broke, knowing that I would soon lose him. “Please don’t die,” I said to Randy when I hugged him onstage. “All the magic will go out of my life.” Because he was my magic man. Without him, I believed nothing special or fun would ever happen to me or to our children again. The audience gave Randy a standing ovation. Afterward, in the atrium, he sat receiving people who stood in line to talk to him. Then we went out to dinner with a small group of people composed of Randy’s research team, former students and colleagues.

  For now, the magic wasn’t going to stop, but rather turn surreal. A video of the lecture was posted on YouTube and became an Internet sensation. Soon Randy began receiving calls from major television network producers inviting him to appear on talk and news shows.

  One morning in late September, Logan and I were leaving a local preschool that we had been checking out when my cell phone rang. It was Randy, excited that he had just been invited to appear on Good Morning America with Diane Sawyer! He began going through the logistics of flying the family up to New York City so we could all go to the studio together. Immediately, my mind began tripping over the details: What would the children wear on national television? Were they in need of haircuts? Where would the children and I be while Randy was on the set? Randy didn’t care about the first two issues and explained I would have to corral the kids on a television set with cameras and power cords everywhere while he sat in a comfortable chair and talked with Diane Sawyer. Harrumph! This scenario was starting to have disaster written all over it. I could imagine myself trying to keep three little children quiet so their father wouldn’t be distracted while he spoke on live television. I had recently wrangled the children while we took formal family portraits outdoors; that experience had left me breathless and at the end of my rope with them. I surely did not want a repeat situation with television cameras aimed at us! So I encouraged Randy to fly to New York City without us and give the interview while we watched him at home on television.

  The appearance on Good Morning America was the first of several incredible experiences that resulted from Randy’s lecture. For many of them, I chose to remain at home with our children, keeping up with the daily demands of domestic life and child rearing. Meanwhile, Randy met Oprah Winfrey and Dr. Oz, gave a lecture on time management at the University of Virginia, and spent a few hours meeting and playing football with the Pittsburgh Steelers, courtesy of ABC News and Diane Sawyer. I was thrilled that he had these extraordinary opportunities and that his final lecture had resonated so strongly with people. But at the same time, I wanted more of his energies to be directed toward our children.

  Work and home life had always been an ongoing, contentious balance for Randy and me. When we dated, I could call Randy up any night of the week at midnight, and he’d still be in the lab. After we were married and had children, Randy would come home for dinner and stay until after the kids were asleep, then head back into the lab or work on his computer until midnight. The excitement and interest generated by his lecture became the new, all-consuming time sink, as his students and research had been before he became ill. I coveted every minute we had with Randy, and I loathed the new demands placed on his time, especially those that took him away from our house and our children. Randy and I were constantly negotiating the balance between his external distractions and our family.

  As with other issues we faced in our marriage, Randy and I talked honestly and openly about what we were feeling. I continued to want all of my husband’s time to be devoted to our family. Randy wanted to ride the wave of interest in his lecture, to allow more people to hear and to benefit from his talk, as well as to enjoy new, exciting experiences. I had to accept that it was his life that was coming to an end and that he had to finish it the way he wanted. So I had to figure out a way to be supportive of Randy and accompany him on the trips or participate in the things that he deemed important, while maintaining a normal routine and life for our children.

  In the fall of 2007, our children still did not know that Randy’s cancer had returned after his surgery and treatments and that it had spread to different parts of his body. They didn’t know Randy’s time was so limited. I wanted to lead a life that to them seemed normal in every way, so they wouldn’t know by our actions that something was wrong. For example, we were not going to eat steak and lobster every night for dinner as if it was Randy’s last meal. We weren’t going to travel to all the places he had never visited. Many times, I felt guilty about not telling the children the truth about their father’s condition, but then I would remember that they didn’t have the ability to handle the stress of the k
nowledge that their father would die very soon. I was juggling two different sets of needs: Randy’s desire to live life to the fullest before the cancer took away all his energy and the children’s high demand for parental interaction.

  How does one balance homework, housekeeping, soccer games, and birthday parties with talking to reporters, meeting with photographers, appearing on national television, and acting in a Hollywood movie? This didn’t seem like a normal lifestyle to me, and it wasn’t one to which we were accustomed. I didn’t know how to explain it to our children when we had a photographer and crew come to our house at six a.m. to set up for a shoot or when a videographer from a major network shadowed us at Disney World to document our experiences and memories of the trip. Instead of trying to justify or explain the camera crew’s presence, I simply presented the information as a fact and didn’t offer an elaborate explanation. Because the children were so young, they didn’t question me. If they did ask, I replied that Daddy had written a book that a lot of people liked. That was answer enough, and the children moved on to other interests. Randy wasn’t concerned with how the children interpreted these events. His focus was on squeezing every joyous moment he could out of the time he had left. And he wanted me to share them with him.

  I learned to evaluate each opportunity Randy was given and decide whether or not it was essential that I go with him. He had told me several times that he wanted me to see the Magic Castle, a Los Angeles club. Only magicians are members; they go there to practice their tricks and moves and perform shows for other magicians and guests in attendance. In the fall of 2007, Randy and I went to the Magic Castle with two friends and had the time of our lives, and Randy was thrilled that I enjoyed it as much as he thought I would.