Free The last lecture by Randy Pausch Page A

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