The Last Lecture

I am glad that so far everyone has felt that committing the time to reading The Last Lecture by Randy Pausch was time well spent. Though the premise of the book was extremely sad, I felt like reading it for a second time because I enjoyed it so much. As a healthy parent of 2 great kids, I couldn't help but wish I had the strength, fortitude and ability to reflect that Randy Pausch exhibited during some of his last days.

While reading his book, I took a bit of a different perspective then I thought I would. We are parents who had to face the death of a child long before it should ever have to be. I kept asking myself if we had done and said everything we needed to as Cooper and Campbell's parents, knowing we were facing the end of his life. Though he was still young, we wanted to be sure Coop's life was full, that we would have no regrets and that Campbell would not suffer any undue side effects from losing his treasured brother. It was the same type of planning Randy did, only we weren't planning for us. I remember the day when we met at Children's Hospital for the last time, Jeff, myself, mom ,Uncle Rick and many of Coop's doctors and some support staff were all sitting around a big table. Jeff and I never really had our heads in the clouds during our experience with Coop, so we went in knowing the overall purpose of the "meeting".. However, when the conversation went on, I remember having this overwhelming feeling when it was finally put out there, he most definitely would not survive this illness. No one had ever said that this was the end before. We knew this day could come, but never had to hear it so frankly. Though you think my first thought would be Coop, mine wasn't ... it was Campbell. I kept asking myself how was he going to be able to go through this whole experience and not be negatively influenced by it. Would he ever be "normal"? What were we going to have to do as parents to get him through this? Did we have the strength to survi ve this ourselves?Obviously Coop was our primary focus, but we were the survivors left to continue living, hopefully someday happily again. In the end we feel thankful that the whole experience made us a stronger family rather then the opposite. Experiences like Randy Pausch's and ours can make or break people, and luckily the latter was not the case.

What we realized is when Coop died, the life we knew died with him. We were left to start again, to figure out what life was supposed to look like now, but the beauty of it all was we were left in charge of making the choice- live and live well, or not- that's what it really comes down to. Randy Pausch set his family up to live and to live well. We look at our life now and wonder how we could be so lucky to be where we are. Emerson would have never been, life would not be as rich and we would not know the "secret" we know about living, had our special boy Coop not taught us that.