bethinexile | My father and Terry Pratchett

No, my father never met Sir Terry Pratchett. He probably never read any of his books, although he would have loved them -- especially the later, snarkier, more Twain-esque* ones. Funnily enough, my father actually looked a little like Terry Pratchett, although he didn't wear a hat.

Many of you already know that my father (the nuclear physicist) died of Alzheimer's. He didn't have the same very rare type that Sir Terry had, which was diagnosable and allowed the victim to continue functioning to a considerable extent for several years. My father's early-onset Alzheimer's robbed him of vocabulary, coherent speech and linear thinking well before the end, and like most cases of Alzheimer's, the confirmed diagnosis took the form of an autopsy.

But.

Dad didn't get to read any of the books because his illness was already well advanced by the late 80's, about the time Terry Pratchett first became a full-time writer. At that time, Alzheimer's was still rare and little studied (his doctor made a horrible mess of the diagnosis, which devastated the family even more, especially my mother). Early-onset Alzheimer's was even rarer. My father was one of the first whispers of the coming tsunami: during the decade before we lost him the rest of the way, we saw more research done, and a gradual slight lessening of the utterly black mystery.

One of the last important decisions Dad made in his life, while he could still make decisions, was to participate in one of the clinical studies that were being conducted on the first generations of amelioratory drugs. He was too far along for it to do him much good, but as long as he could choose to throw his damaged brain into the ring for one last round on the side of science, he did. (It wasn't even the very last last round, as it happened.)** The drug he helped test was entirely unfamiliar to us at the time, but ever since then, every time I see an ad for Aricept, I think about my father's final legacy.

Yeah. Aricept. That's the medication that Sir Terry Pratchett took (about which he wrote a brilliant blistering advocacy piece regarding the importance of getting meds into the hands of those who need them, especially those who were not best-selling authors with pots of cash).

I got onto a mad Pratchett binge starting a year ago or so, and have worked my way through the entire Discworld series, re-reading the works I had read and reading, for the first time, the ones I had not -- which was more than half of them!! I've read sections out loud to Missy, and we've listened together to Stephen Briggs' brilliant audiobook performances of a couple of them, with more planned for the future. I read Raising Steam with misty eyes, seeing in the book Sir Terry's farewell to his own universe. I just saw, this evening, the reports that one final Tiffany Aching book was completed and is still in the queue, and it's like a final gift manifesting from Dunmanifestin.

By my own lights -- entirely my personal take here, of course -- Terry Pratchett, like most masters of any art, became better at it as he went. The early books weren't works of genius and masterful craft; he learned as he went, and by the last stretch of his career, it was one drawjopping gem after another. (It reminds me of Stan Rogers, in fact.)

Sir Terry completed four books after his diagnosis -- five, if The Shepherd's Crown is a reality and not a rumour. I don't know when he started taking Aricept, and I don't know how much of a difference it made in his last eight years of life. But in a weird way, in the middle of my grief and loss over a favourite author, I'm also remembering my father. I remember him opting in to the study (he hated the weeks when he got placebos instead of active pills, and knew right away when he had).

Dad, you knew what you were doing would help people, hopefully for years, years beyond the point where you could reach directly. Somewhere, there are undoubtedly Alzheimer's victims whose little slices of pharmaceutically borrowed time -- borrowed or stolen or snatched away from the greedy slavering darkness -- have given them time to finish projects, to do that extra bit of research or watch their kid pass just one more milestone, or maybe, if it's Terry Pratchett, write half a dozen novels.

It's a weird comfort right now. But I'll take it. Weird is okay by me.

I miss you, Dad. And I will miss you, Sir Terry Pratchett, even though I only got to know you through your books.

Thank you. Thank you both.

*Let's be honest -- if Sir Terry had been writing anything other than genre fiction, he'd've been crowned as Twain's successor years ago.

**Dad's brain was donated to Alzheimer's research -- or, as I like to think, less than a day after his death, he was reincarnated as research data.