Christensen tears up easily, but he cries mostly in gratitude. When he received his diagnosis, he was calm. “What would be depressing is if I’d spent my life to that point on things that didn’t matter,” he says. “But I felt that I could look back on my life and think about lots of folks that I helped become better folks. And I’ve tried to be as good a man as I could be.” He had always tried to help people, whether through teaching, or consulting, or helping out with money, or signing up every week he could in church for good deeds. He would miss his family when he was dead, but he’d see them again in Heaven.
...
He had talked for more than an hour, and at the end of the talk several people asked him questions...“If I can ever be useful to you, oh, my gosh, what a magnificent company,” he said. He looked up and smiled again. “If you ever need somebody to bounce an idea or two off, it’s the only way I can ever learn, if folks like you would give me a chance to think things through, so I would love to talk with you,” he said. “Thank you so much.”
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2012/05/14/when-giants-fail
He's a good person, though. Good person. Better person than I have ever been or ever will be.
*UPDATE: NOT a good person when he said Jill Lepore committed "a criminal act of dishonesty," however. That was bad Christensen, fucking BAD. (12:40 am UTC, November 4, 2014.)
