이번주 강의 ― The Last Lecture (8)

[조국현]

The Last Lecture는
미국 펜실베니아주 피츠버그에 있는 Carnegie Mellon 대학의 Randy Pausch 교수가
젊은 나이에 췌장암으로 시한부 인생을 남겨둔 상황에서
어린 세 자녀를 위해 남긴 기록입니다.

따라서  이 책은 '죽음'의 기록이 아니라 '삶'의 올바른 방향을 제시하는,
인생의 통찰을 줄 수 있을 만한 책인 것 같습니다.

뉴욕 타임즈의 베스트셀러에도 선정되었고요.
훌륭한 책을 토대로 영어도 배우고 인생도 배워보시죠.

The Last Lecture (8)

Chapter II : REALLY ACHIEVING YOUR CHILDHOOD DREAMS / 4 : The Parent Lottery

My mother, meanwhile, knew plenty, too. All my life, she saw it as part of her mission to keep my cockiness in check. I’m grateful for that now. Even these days, if someone asks her what I was like as a kid, she describes me as “alert, but not terribly precocious.” We now live in an age when parents praise every child as a genius. And here’s my mother, figuring “alert” ought to suffice as a compliment.

When I was studying for my PhD, I took something called “the theory qualifier,” which I can now definitively say was the second worst thing in my life after chemotherapy. When I complained to my mother about how hard and awful the test was, she leaned over, patted me on the arm and said, “We know just how you feel, honey. And remember, when your father was your age, he was fighting the Germans.”

After I got my PhD, my mother took great relish in introducing me by saying: “This is my son. He’s a doctor, but not the kind who helps people.”

My parents knew what it really took to help people. They were always finding big projects off the beaten path, then throwing themselves into them. Together, they underwrote a fifty-student dormitory in rural Thailand, which was designed to help girls remain in school and avoid prostitution.

My mother was always supremely charitable. And my father would have been happy giving everything away and living in a sack cloth instead of in the suburbs, where the rest of us wanted to live. In that sense, I consider my father the most “Christian” man I’ve ever met. He was also a huge champion of social equality. Unlike my mom, he didn’t easily embrace organized religion. (We were Presbyterians.) He was more focused on the grandest ideals and saw equality as the greatest of goals. He had high hopes for society, and though his hopes were too often dashed, he remained a raging optimist.

At age eighty-three, my dad was diagnosed with leukemia. Knowing he didn’t have long to live, he arranged to donate his body to medical science, and he gave money to continue his program in Thailand for at least six more years.

Many people who saw my last lecture were taken with one particular photo that I flashed on the overhead screen: It’s a photo in which I’m in my pajamas, leaning on my elbow, and it’s so obvious that I was a kid who loved to dream big dreams.

The wood slat that cuts across my body is the front of the bunk bed. My dad, a pretty able woodworker, made me that bed. The smile on that kid’s face, the wood slat, the look in his eyes: that photo reminds me that I won the parent lottery.

Although my children will have a loving mother who I know will guide them through life brilliantly, they will not have their father. I’ve accepted that, but it does hurt.

I’d like to believe my dad would have approved of how I’m going about these last months of my life. He would have advised me to put everything in order for Jai, to spend as much time as possible with the kids—the things I’m doing. I know he would see the sense in moving the family to Virginia.

I also think my dad would be reminding me that kids—more than anything else—need to know their parents love them. Their parents don’t have to be alive for that to happen.