The Last Lecture

The Last Lecture
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.
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