The Last Lecture

The Last Lecture
night. “He just left it there on the table, and went to his computer.” She
knew I was preoccupied, heading to the Internet to research possible
medical treatments. Still, the dish on the table bothered her. I can’t
blame her. So she wrote about it, felt better, and again we didn’t have to
get into an argument.
Jai tries to focus on each day, rather than the negative things
down the road. “It’s not helpful if we spend every day dreading
tomorrow,” she says.
This last New Year’s Eve, though, was very emotional and
bittersweet in our house. It was Dylan’s sixth birthday, so there was a
celebration. We also were grateful that I had made it to the new year. But
we couldn’t bring ourselves to discuss the elephant in the room: the
future New Year’s Eves without me.
I took Dylan to see a movie that day, Mr. Magorium’s Wonder
Emporium, about a toymaker. I had read an online description of the film,
but it didn’t mention that Mr. Magorium had decided it was time to die
and hand over the shop to an apprentice. So there I was in the theater,
with Dylan on my lap, and he was crying about how Mr. Magorium was
dying. (Dylan doesn’t yet know my prognosis.) If my life were a movie,
this scene of me and Dylan would get slammed by critics for over-the-top
foreshadowing. There was one line in the film, however, that remains
with me. The apprentice (Natalie Portman) tells the toymaker (Dustin
Hoffman) that he can’t die; he has to live. And he responds: “I already
did that.”
Later that night, as the new year approached, Jai could tell I was
depressed. To cheer me up, she reviewed the past year and pointed out
some of the wonderful things that had happened. We had gone on
romantic vacations, just the two of us, that we wouldn’t have taken if
cancer hadn’t offered a reminder about the preciousness of time. We
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