I recently tuned into to watch Jeopardy and quickly realized by the dark colour of Alex Trebek's hair and the style of his suit, it had to be a rerun from long ago.
I wondered briefly about the health of the genial host of America's favourite game show. After all, Trebek, now age 80, has been fighting pancreatic cancer for the past seventeen months.
As you may have guessed, I really enjoy the show. In my teaching days, I loved to play Jeopardy with my students with categories like Triangles and Polygons.
(This type of triangle reminds one of mountain climbing. What is scalene? Our class could travel in this to get to the Royal Ontario Museum? What is a ROM-bus?)
As well, I'm a big fan of Sudbury-born Trebek whose charitable endeavors merited him the Order of Canada in 2017. He's been at the helm of Jeopardy for an incredible 36 years.
I've just finished reading his autobiography, 'The Answer Is...Reflections on My Life,' which was published in July. It's an easy and unpretentious read and it reinforced my intuition that Alex Trebek is a man of integrity and class.
Trebek shares that his days are numbered and that he has decided to forego any further chemotherapy after he finishes his current protocol. I call that courage; he calls it being satisfied with a life well lived.
On the last pages of the book, he writes this farewell.
"My life has been a quest for knowledge and understanding, and I'm nowhere near having achieved that. And it doesn't bother me in the least. I will die without having come up with the answer to many things in life.
I'm often asked how I would like to be remembered. I don't think about it much. But I suppose if I had to answer I would say I'd like to be remembered first of all as a good and loving husband and father, and also as a decent man who did his best to help people perform at their best. Because that was my job. That is what a host is supposed to do. You are there to make contestants relax enough that they can demonstrate their skills. They are the stars of the show. They are the ones the viewers tuned in to see. And if you do that, if you put the focus on the players rather than yourself, the viewers will look on you as a good guy. If that's the way I'm remembered, I'm perfectly happy with that."
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