The news is no less shitty for being expected. Terry Pratchett, long suffering from early onset Alzheimers, has died. I’d been worrying about it ever since he pulled out of the Discworld con last year. I’ve been crying ever since I heard the news, coming in from an after work dinner with co-workers.
It’s hard to underestimate the impact he has had on my life, through his books and his fandom. The humour came first of course, shining through even the idiosynchronatic Dutch translation; the deep humanity came later. And then, in 1997 pTerry came to the Netherlands for a book signing in Rotterdam and I came into contact with alt.fan.pratchett fandom, people who are still friends almost twenty years later. There was Usenet and meetups and irc and Clarecraft Discworld Events and Discworld Cons.
And then there was Sandra.
We met on lspace IRC in spring 2000, mutually annoying each other (in what turned out to be a flirty way), then getting to talking each evening on the phone, then she came over just after Christmas 2000 and that was that. We spent the next two years travelling to and from each other’s homes, until in 2003 she moved in with me. Cue seven years of bliss, or at least domestic comfort, all thanks to Terry Pratchett.
But that’s not the best thing Terry Pratchett did for Sandra and me. The best thing he did for her was to help her die at a time of her own choosing. It was watching his documentary when she was in the middle of a two year battle with failing kidneys and the side effects of receiving a transplant. Talking it over afterwards she admitted that she had been thinking of wanting to die herself, of thinking that there would be a point at which she felt her life would no longer be worth living, that she had to give up the battle.
In the end, she of course did. She had been afraid that if and when she died, it would’ve been in pain and fear, not at a time and place of her own choosing. Terry Pratchett’s documentary gave her the strength and conviction to do put an end to a struggle no longer worth fighting, when she still had the ability to do so with dignity and on her own terms.
That was the greatest gift he could’ve given her and me, but I’ve never found the words to thank him for it.
Cat
March 12, 2015 at 5:02 pm*slow tears*
He was a great man, and I loved his work first for its humor and only later for the truth that hid behind the humor.
I have been working on learning Dutch with my dad. I have just about worked my way through my uncle Piet’s book, Gezonde Twijfel. We talked about having me translate an English book into Dutch. I think I will pick one of Pratchett’s. Dad has never read anything by him, and I think he will enjoy it.
(I know Pratchett’s books were translated into many languages, and Dutch may well be among them, but the translation is to help me learn Dutch more than anything else, and English books are considerably easier to get in the US than Dutch ones.)