Life According to the Last

¶ … Life According to the Last Lecture

It is difficult to conceptualize and verbalize those things which should be seen as most important to us in life. This is, of course, a deeply subjective discussion and one highly subject to changes in perspective as one goes through various stages of one's life. The terminal stage though is one which imposes perhaps the greatest demand for introspection, for evaluation and for reflection on how the life behind one stacks up to the life which one perceived ahead of him so many years ago. This seems to be the challenge at the center of Pausch's () sobering and simultaneously affirming meditation on death.

Indeed, Pausch provides us with a compelling meditation on the cusp of his own tragically young and impending death that centers on the identification of those things which truly matter. As expected and understood, Pausch spends considerable focus on the importance of his wife and family. In his perspective, these constituted his highest priority, his legacy and his purpose on earth. But this resolution was not in and of itself satisfying for the professor, lecturer and author. Instead, he sought a way to validate himself more personally and directly, and in such a manner that the priorities of greatest importance could be reiterated for his children as they became old enough to understand them.

In light of this self-imposed task, Pausch would arrive at one major ambition that seems to be repeated throughout his text, which is that one should remain committed to the ambitions and fantasies that form during childhood. To this end, Pausch may be seen as a lucky man. While we are troubled by the arbitrary misfortune that would strike down a smart, attractive and powerful man during his prime years, Pausch insists that his priorities have allowed him to be completely fulfilled even on the cusp of death. He claims that "whatever my accomplishments, all of the things I loved were rooted in the dreams and goals I had as a child . . . And in the ways I had managed to fulfill almost all of them. My uniqueness, I realized, came in the specifics of all the dreams -- form incredibly meaningful to decidedly quirky -- that defined my forty-six years of life." (p. 10)

As Pausch arrives at this revelation, it is knowing full well that he is fast approaching death, but it has allowed him to view this not with bitterness but with a sense of his good fortunate at having been able to accomplish so much of what he desired in that short space of time allotted. Of course, we can also see on a psychoanalytical level that there are elements of importance attributed to certain aspects of Pausch's life that are not explicitly stated in the text. Namely, one is inclined to consider the professional aspirations that have marked his time on earth and the degree to which these come to define so much in his final days. Indeed, the text makes frequent reference to the difficulty which Pausch experiences in attempting to balance his family life and the time spent on his swan song lecture, with the understanding that he feels he must accomplish something important in relation to the latter.