Randy Pausch is lying on his bed, his head propped up by pillows, his hands interlocked on his chest. In his pressed khakis, red polo shirt and bare feet, he looks the stereotypical suburban dad, which he is.
And with his rosy cheeks and dark hair still wet from the shower, he also looks the picture of health, which he is not. He's dying.
PHOTOS: Check out Randy Pausch's life in pictures
VIDEO: See the "Last Lecture" on YouTube
Pausch, 47, has pancreatic cancer, a terminal disease. So far he has defied the odds, but the cancer has spread to his liver. His prognosis is poor.
Pausch, a professor at Pittsburgh's Carnegie Mellon University, isn't about dying, however. He's about living. Living for his wife and their three young children. Living a good life as long as he can.
A now-famous lecture he gave at Carnegie in September has inspired millions who have viewed it on YouTube to follow his example. He hopes his new book, The Last Lecture (Hyperion, $21.95), in stores today, will do the same. His publisher is banking on Lecture to become the next Tuesdays With Morrie, the mega-best-seller about another dying professor.
Written with Wall Street Journal columnist Jeffrey Zaslow, The Last Lecture expands on Pausch's speech, in which he spoke of the importance of having fun and dreams. It was delivered with good humor. Hyperion, in a bidding war, paid $6.7 million to publish it. The first printing is 400,000 copies, and it's being translated into at least 17 languages.
The lecture, Pausch now says, was never meant for public consumption, nor was it for his colleagues or students. It was for his two sons and daughter: Dylan, 6, Logan, 3, and Chloe, 22 months.
"I knew what I was doing that day," he writes in the book's introduction. "Under the ruse of giving an academic lecture, I was trying to put myself in a bottle that would one day wash up on the beach for my children."
Their photos and artwork are plastered all over the refrigerator at his home in southeastern Virginia, where Pausch recently moved his family so they can be near his wife's relatives when he dies. The backyard boasts their jungle gym. The front yard is littered with their toys. Pausch's bedstand is filled not only with red plastic pill bottles but a blue-ink outline of a child's hand on a piece of white paper. Dylan's.
"If people are finding inspiration, OK, but the book is for my kids," he says. It's crucial, he says, for his children "to have a sense of how their parents felt about them. They need to know their parents loved them and there was a connection."
Pausch says he had no desire to turn his life, and death, into a cottage industry. But much has been out of his control.
A Web sensation
He became an Internet celebrity after the lecture at Carnegie, where he is a professor of computer science, human computer interaction and design. The "last lecture" is an academic tradition in which a professor is invited to speak as if it's the last lecture he'll ever give. In Pausch's case, it was.
The talk, videotaped by the university, became a phenomenon, spreading like wildfire over the Web. More than 6 million people have viewed it.
Pausch then was invited to appear on Oprah and Good Morning America last fall. (He will be the focus of a Diane Sawyer Primetime special Wednesday on ABC.)
He decided to go on Oprah only because she gave him the mike for 10 minutes. "I figured if I have the chance to give my dad's wisdom (which he imparted in the lecture and includes the power of humility) to 10 million people for 10 minutes, I should take it." Once again he was a hit.
Zaslow, who attended the Carnegie lecture and wrote a column about it for the Journal, was not surprised by Pausch's powerful presence on Oprah. Zaslow calls the professor "a consummate performer. He loves an audience of any kind."
Birth of a book
But Pausch wasn't sure he wanted to use his limited time writing a book. He did so at the urging of his wife, Jai, 41.
"It's much more cathartic than I thought it would be," says Pausch, who has stopped teaching. "I was completely surprised."
He collaborated with Zaslow on his cellphone headset while riding his bike through his neighborhood.
"I got to hear 53 extra lectures that no one else got," says Zaslow, who then condensed them into the book in two months.
"Originally Randy wasn't sure he'd be alive when the book was written," Zaslow says. "But he was healthy throughout. Every comma mattered to him. Every thought mattered. He even counted the number of references to each kid. He was very hands-on. It was fascinating to see his mind work."
Putting together a book with a dying author in a short time worked to everyone's advantage, says Robert Miller, Hyperion's president.
"There was editing going on around the clock," Miller says. "It added to the excitement of the whole project. Everything clicked."
Miller says the book already has gotten an "incredible response. People know about Randy from the lecture, and when we gave them an advance (copy), they were very moved by the book."
Powerful reach
The bidding war to publish it indicates the industry "saw the potential to reach people with something that has such power," Miller says.
Excluding income from the sales of rights to foreign publishers, Hyperion would need to sell about 800,000 copies in the USA to recoup its investment, says Larry Kirshbaum, former CEO of Time-Warner Book Group and now a literary agent.
Edward Ash-Milby, a buyer for the bookstore chain Barnes & Noble, believes Pausch's book could be the next Tuesdays With Morrie, in which Mitch Albom recounted his weekly meetings with a former professor who was dying. The book has sold more than 14 million copies worldwide since 1997 and became an Oprah Winfrey-produced TV movie. (Pausch says he has never read Morrie. "I didn't know there was a dying-professor section at the bookstore.")
Ash-Milby believes Web hits will translate into book sales in this case. "Considering how many times it was watched, it has a strong chance to be a No. 1 best seller," he says.
The lecture has been seen all over the world, prompting viewers to comment from as far away as South Africa. Tim Cohen, a columnist for Business Day in Johannesburg, wrote that it was an only-in-America story:
"What strikes me about this event was what an American story it is; from the hokeyness to the hopefulness, it is hard to imagine something with that unique mixture of goofy boldness and visionary earnestness coming out of anywhere else."
Though The Last Lecture may seem to have Hollywood written all over it, Pausch says there will be no movie.
"There's a reason to do the book, but if it's telling the story of the lecture in the medium of film, we already have that," he says, referring to the video. "Besides, you lose control."
Pausch spends his days sleeping, playing with the kids and watching the big-screen TV at the foot of his bed, an acquisition he's embarrassed by, although he admits he has become addicted to Mythbusters on the Discovery Channel. It fuels his love of solving math problems.
His children have not been told he's dying, only that he is sick.
"They've been told that there's a weed growing in me and it had to be cut out and then chemicals had to be used," Pausch says. His son Dylan asked if there was any way he could help. "They have to be told they can't catch it and it's not their fault."
He says he does not look forward to the day he has to tell them the end is near.
"But until I'm very symptomatic, there's no need to talk about it." He'd rather concentrate on the now, like this morning when he changed his baby's diaper. "I was a hero," he says with a laugh.
More than 33,000 people in the USA die of pancreatic cancer every year. (Actor Patrick Swayze was diagnosed with the disease last month.) The average life expectancy after diagnosis is three to six months, although chemotherapy and surgery have extended Pausch's life. He was diagnosed in August.
Because Pausch has lived longer than expected, some bloggers have claimed he isn't sick at all.
"Yes, well, if 6 million people have watched some or all of the lecture, it's not too surprising a tiny handful might challenge that," he says. "After all, we have a whole generation of conspiracy theorists who grew up watching The X-Files."
Hoping for a miracle
But Pausch's Virginia-based oncologist, Michael Lee, attests to "the unfortunate fact that he does indeed have metastatic, incurable pancreatic cancer — the biopsy of his liver last summer proved it."
"He was in the lucky group whose cancer responded to the initial treatment," Lee says. "However, his treatment hasn't been without significant side effects, some of which landed him in the hospital recently and will require at least some time away from chemo. He appears to be recovering and is still healthy enough to keep fighting."
Pausch concedes that his "shelf life" is limited. But, he says, "I don't want anyone to pity me or treat me like I'm already dead. I've still got gas in the tank."
He's not opposed to miracles, either.
"I'd love to be the one-in-5-million fluke."
Source: http://www.usatoday.com