Randy Pausch is Dead

Whatever you may think about the Last Lecture: that it was rife with cliché, that Randy Pausch's 15 minutes were up months ago, whatever. Please go donate $10 to The Lustgarten Foundation for fighting pancreatic cancer.

Go read his blog. His doctors, last August, gave him three to six months of good health. Like clockwork, in February, everything started to fall apart. The chemotherapy that had been keeping him relatively healthy started poisoning his body, causing his kidneys and heart to fail. His body collapsed under the stress of both the disease and the treatment. He wrote about getting better, about trying new treatments, but it was easy to see the writing on the wall. He hasn't blogged in a month, and honestly, whenever I thought about him, I'd go to his blog to see if he was still alive. This morning, when I couldn't get through, I figured his site was overwhelmed because his death had just been announced. A quick trip to the all-knowing Wikipedia confirmed it. Pausch took a dive bomb for the worse last week, and yesterday, he died. I didn't know the guy; heck, I didn't even watch all of the Last Lecture. But his blog posts were nothing short of inspiring. This guy didn't lay in bed waiting to waste away. He went SCUBA diving. He took his kid on a dolphin swim. He filmed PSAs for the Lustgarten Foundation and urged parents to send their kids to his beloved Carnegie Mellon University.

And I'm sad. But what I think means shit. He has three kids, all under age 6. We will miss a blip on the American culture radar screen. They've lost a parent.

And he's one of the lucky ones. 75% of all pancreatic cancer patients have less than a year at the time of diagnosis.

I'm not saying that we all need to start wearing purple ribbons or bracelets or jump on another disease bandwagon. I'm saying that today, go give $10 for pancreatic cancer research. And also, if you have the time, eat a banana. . . because they taste good, and they may be disappearing forever.