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“I waited till 39 to get married because I had to wait that long to find someone where her happiness was more important than mine.”

What a beautiful declaration of love!

It is from Randy Pausch, a very popular professor at Carnegie Mellon University. He is a married father of three, 47 years old, suffering from pancreatic cancer. Nine months ago he was told he had only 3-6 months to live. But just a few days ago (May 18, 2008) he was able to address the CMU 2008 graduating class:

The only advice I can give you on how to live your life well:
It is not the things we do in life that we regret on our death bed, it is the things we do not. (…)

Find your passion and follow it. (…) You will not find that passion in things, and you will not find that passion in money. (…)

That passion will be grounded in people and it will be grounded in the relationships you have with people and what they think of you when your time comes. And if you can gain the respect of those around you and the passion and true love and I`ve said this before, but I waited till 39 to get married because I had to wait that long to find someone where her happiness was more important than mine.

And if nothing else I hope that all of you can find that kind of passion and that kind of love in your life.

Randy Pausch addressing the CMU 2008 graduating class, May 18, 2008

Isn`t that beautiful? And there is more. Back in September 2007, Randy Pausch gave a “Last Lecture” to his students at Carnegie Mellon. It is an incredible speech, beautifully optimistic and sad at the same time. It’s about his childhood dreams, how he achieved them, how he enabled others to achieve their dreams and lessons learned. At the end of the speech he admits he really only intended his words for his three small children. Hard to keep tears from falling. Watch the speech here.

One of my favourite excerpts is this one:

But the best story I have about my dad – unfortunately my dad passed away a little over a year ago – and when we were going through his things, he had fought in World War II in the Battle of the Bulge, and when we were going through his things, we found out he had been awarded the Bronze Star for Valor. My mom didn’t know it. In 50 years of marriage it had just never come up.
My mom. [Shows picture of Randy as a young child, pulling his Mom’s hair]. Mothers are people who love even when you pull their hair. And I have two great mom stories. When I was here studying to get my Ph.D. and I was taking something called the theory qualifier, which I can definitively say is the second worst thing in my life after chemotherapy. [laughter] And I was complaining to my mother about how hard this test was and how awful it was, and she just leaned over and she patted me on the arm and she said, we know how you feel honey, and remember when your father was your age he was fighting the Germans. [laughter] After I got my Ph.D., my mother took great relish in introducing me as, this is my son, he’s a doctor but not the kind that helps people. [laughter] These slides are a little bit dark [meaning “hard to see”], but when I was in high school I decided to paint my bedroom. [shows slides of bedroom] I always wanted a submarine and an elevator. And the great thing about this [shows slide of quadratic formula painted on wall] [interrupted by laughter] – what can I say? And the great thing about this is they let me do it. And they didn’t get upset about it. And it’s still there. If you go to my parent’s house it’s still there. And anybody who is out there who is a parent, if your kids want to paint their bedroom, as a favor to me let them do it. It’ll be OK. Don’t worry about resale value on the house. (…)

And here is the very sweet advice he gave to his 2-years-old daughter:

And my little girl, Chloe, well the thing I want to tell her is—you’re not allowed to date until you’re 30!
But when you do start dating, my advice on boys is [to] just ignore everything they say and just pay attention to what they do. If you do that, you’re not going to make all the big mistakes.