Computer science professor Randy Pausch wasn’t going to let an “engineering problem” make him morose.

After learning he had an aggressive case of pancreatic cancer, Pausch immediately began planning his departures from family members, colleagues and students at Carnegie Mellon University, where he delivered a farewell lecture called “Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams” to a packed auditorium in September 2007.

Pausch, who was 46, died almost a year later, but his pragmatic and inspirational approach to confronting death lives on.

“The Last Lecture,” the book he wrote with Wall Street Journal columnist Jeffrey Zaslow, became an immediate best-seller after it was published in April and has since been translated into 38 languages.

Zaslow, who will speak at a local luncheon Wednesday, first wrote about Pausch in his “Moving On” column, which explores life transitions.

“I was nervous as I drove to hear Randy’s lecture,” Zaslow said. “What do you say to a dying man?”

But the publication of the column, which contained a link to a brief video segment from Pausch’s lecture, helped create a global Web phenomenon, generating e-mails from people around the world. Millions have viewed his lecture on Yahoo, YouTube and other Web sites.

During a recent phone interview, Zaslow said he feels honored to have helped Pausch spread his message to a larger audience. And he is overwhelmed at the stories of sorrow and grief he hears at lectures and book signings.

“People tell me the saddest stories,” Zaslow said. “I’ve become a depository for all these things they want to share. I’m the guy they tell their stories to.”

Meanwhile, Pausch has become a hero to millions for the provocative way he stared down death, and the positive approach he took toward making the most of his remaining time with his wife and three young children.

“I could easily feel sorry for myself,” he wrote. “While I still can, I embrace every moment with them, and do the logistical things necessary to ease their path into a life without me.”

Humans have struggled to confront death for eons. Pausch’s approach is practical and unsentimental. In his last lecture, Pausch showed his audience a PowerPoint slide of the CT scan of his liver.

“That is what it is,” he said. “We can’t change it. We just have to decide how we will respond. We cannot change the cards we are dealt, just how we play the hand.”

His approach is also nonreligious, Zaslow said.

“In his lecture he was speaking to an audience containing a fair number of computer nerds,” Zaslow said. “When he told them he had experienced a death bed conversion, he was talking about his conversion from a PC to a Mac.

“His approach was authentic. And people liked the fact that he was not a dying man in a death bed, but someone who was telling jokes and doing push-ups on stage.”

In an interview Pausch gave the month before his death, he told uua.org, the Web site of the Unitarian Universalist Association of Congregations, that he had been raised a Presbyterian but converted to Unitarianism because it “appeals to reason and thought more than dogma.”

Zaslow will speak about Pausch and show portions of his last lecture at the Wednesday luncheon, which is sponsored by Pikes Peak Behavioral Health Group.

DETAILS

Book author and journalist Jeffrey Zaslow will talk about “The Last Lecture”When: 11 a.m. WednesdayWhere: Cheyenne Mountain Resort, 3225 Broadmoor Valley RoadTickets: $35; purchase through the Pikes Peak Behavioral Health Group’s Web site, www.ppbhg.org, or by calling Karen Alderton at 314-4305.

Pedestrians are reflected on an electric market board in Tokyo showing the Japanese stock’s 974.12-point fall in Tokyo, Friday, Oct. 10, 2008. Japan’s key stock index plunged a stunning 9.6 percent Friday to close out its worst week in history. Photo by