The Measure of a Life
December 26th is my husband's birthday. Every year, we struggle to put aside the chaos of the previous day's celebrations in an attempt to focus on his special day. This past December 26th was no different. We attempted to simultaneously clean up the house from the piles of wrapping paper and boxes, deal with the residue/dishes of the 20 people who had been here for dinner the night before, and prepare for the neighborhood Boxing Day party we attend each year on the night of the 26th – while also carving out an hour or two for a special family celebration for the Head of Household. This past December 26th, there was an extra note of freneticness to the day. Our oldest was home from graduate school for the first time in a number of months, and had brought a friend to stay as well. Our middle one had just returned, by way of London, from several months in Kenya. One of her traveling companions had contracted a blistering case of malaria in East Africa and had been hospitalized in the U.K. – there was lots to catch up on there. And our youngest, also just home from college, added his own friends, etc. to the merry chaos. All told, a house that had spent the bulk of 2004 enduring a remodel was, between December 22nd and December 28th, being asked – ready or not – to provide shelter and organized social events to the unending stream of family and friends that swept through during those closing days of the year. So by mid-afternoon on the 26th, when the 19 year-old emerged from the den and said he'd seen on-line that there had been a 9.0 earthquake off the coast of Sumatra – not only were we too busy to take notice, what with birthday party clean-up and preparing food and gifts for the Boxing Day event, my first and only response was: "That's just not possible. Doesn't the scale end at 8.5?" Of course, as we all now know, the scale does not end at 8.5. It was indeed a 9.0, the earth's crust shuddered, the planet wobbled in its orbit, lives were destroyed, a tsunami of historic proportions was precipitated by the earthquake, many more tens of thousands of lives were destroyed, and in the 14 days since the event – the world has attempted to come to grips with a loss of life currently estimated to be at 150,000 and counting. It's beyond comprehension, yet we try to comprehend as we watch the world attempt to deal with the aftermath – many thousands injured, millions homeless, and an obliterated fabric of life along thousands of miles of shoreline in the 12 or 13 countries around the Indian Ocean affected by the disaster. ************************* At a personal level, however, by January 8th things had calmed down in our household. Quiet had settled in, once again. All three of the children were back on their respective campuses, their academic schedules had resumed, the holiday clutter was no more, and we were turning our attentions to the next 12 months, not the next 12 hours or the next 12 days. As I attended to the laundry on Saturday morning, my husband said to me, "Did you see that Pederson died?" I said, "Who?" He said, "You know, Don Pederson. The guy who developed SPICE." I stopped: "You're kidding?" He said, "Yeah, I thought you would have seen it in the obituaries in the Chronicle yesterday." "But," I said, "he wasn't that old, was he?" My husband said, "No, not that old. I figured out yesterday that if he was 79 when he died, he was 46 when he was my professor." I stopped folding the laundry, found the Friday Chronicle, and looked for the Obituaries. There it was: "Donald Oscar Pederson – semiconductor chip pioneer." I sat down and read it. "Wait a minute," I said. "He died on Christmas day. Wow, he died the day before the tsunami. Somehow, that's just so … that's just so …" That's so what? What could you say? Don Pederson was 79 and died on Christmas Day. He'd been suffering from Parkinson's disease and had been living in a healthcare center in Concord near Berkeley. The day after he died, another 150,000 people died, also by an act of nature – but far more suddenly and traumatically. I don't know why, but the juxtaposition of the two things was so striking. I never met Don Pederson, but he was my husband's professor at Cal. Clearly, as Richard Newton so affectionately described in the obituary, Pederson made seminal contributions to the EDA and semiconductor industries, but was also – and even more importantly – a marvelous human being. My husband had always remembered Don Pederson as one of the best of his EE professors at Cal. And here Don Pederson was gone. How strange and eerie. I didn't know any of the people who died in the earthquake or the tsunami. I didn't know Don Pederson. But between the huge group that died around the Indian Ocean on December 26th, and the single individual who died in Concord on December 25th – clearly the world is a lesser place for their passing. Richard Newton said in the obituary, "If there was a Nobel Prize in engineering, [Don Pederson] is quite likely to have won it." But then, one might ask: How many of the people who died on December 26th were the Don Pedersons of their communities? There were probably hundreds, if not thousands, of marvelous, contributing, outstanding people who could have been candidates for Nobel Prizes within their own worlds. After all, what is a Nobel Prize but some kind of measure of life, and what are measures of a life except a way to describe a life well lived? More to the point – do any of us live as if this were our last day, our last hour, our last moment, and the measure of our lives could be taken at any time? I had dinner with a friend this weekend. She said to me, "If nothing else – let's live our lives as if we were going to attend our own wake. Will the people who come to my wake remember me joyfully and affectionately? Will they say I contributed something to the world and to quality of their lives? Will they be sorry that I'm gone, but happily raise a glass in my honor? Isn't that all we can really ask of life – that at our wake we would see friends saddened by our passing, but warmed by the memory of our having lived. That should be the true measure of our lives." I believe my friend is right. So as I write this, I raise a glass to Don Pederson – to all that he contributed and to all those who benefited from his work and admired him as a human being. I raise a glass, as well, to the many other strangers who also died on the last weekend of 2004. Their suffering is ended now, but surely the world is a better place for their having lived. Figuratively speaking, I'm at the wake. I raise my glass and say in their honor: You are remembered and you will be missed.
Peggy Aycinena owns and operates EDA Confidential. She can be reached at peggy@aycinena.com
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