CMU Professor Randy Pausch has died. You've probably heard by now.

We all owe a debt of thanks to Professor Pausch, not for sharing his final year, although that itself was a gift. We owe him because he was able to get some funding for pancreatic cancer research and was able to raise awareness that such funding is sorely lacking. Pancreatic cancer is one of the top killers in the US, but there is very little research being done because it is generally thought to be incurable. I suspect many things were considered incurable before research found a cure.

I went to CMU back in the 80s and I worked there for half the 90s, but I did not know Professor Pausch. I followed his story, buth not as closely as a lot of other people I know. I did not read his blog regularly or watch all of his last lecture. I saddened by Randy Pausch's death, not because I knew him, but because I know what his family has been going through.

As I have written earlier, my mother has pancreatic cancer. She is dying. There is nothing the doctors can do to arrest the cancer's spread. All that medical science can offer is palliative measures, a nice way of saying making her feel as good as possible until she dies.

My mother's last hurrah is supposed to start today. A final trip to England, this time with not just my father, but also my younger sister, her husband and kids, and my brother and his son. England has always held a special place in my mother's heart. In the last 40 years, she has probably visited there as many times, not bad on a school teacher's salary. Some of the trips were chaperoning school trips. One included her mother, now gone. A couple included my younger sister and myself. Several included side trips to Scotland or Wales, but it was England that was her love, especially the countryside. She made friends there, with whom she stayed in touch. She found relatives there, to whom she became close.

Now she is hoping to go one last time. I don't know if she will make it. With full confidence that my mother will never read this, I can write that she has been constipated for a week. Not regular constipation, but an upper GI obstruction. When she finally went to the emergency room yesterday, they were able to confirm the blockage. They gave her something my sister describes as "the atomic bomb of colon cleansers," so perhaps she will be relieved before the flight this evening. But something in me thinks that, as she herself put it to me, she waited too long for this trip.

I hope I am wrong.

Update: I was wrong! Their plane landed at 6:36 London time, according to Heathrow's web site. I'm not sure how well the trip will go, but it has begun!

Update: It is not going well. She is now in St. Mary's Hospital in London.