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Terry Pratchett: Choosing to Die

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Last year Terry Pratchett made a documentary about his Alzheimer’s Disease and his wish to die when he wanted to, meeting other people in the same situation, actually following some of them to their moment of dying. It was a powerful, emotional and honest documentary about a difficult subject.

Sandra had had much longer than Pratchett to make up her mind on this, having had to live with her disabilities for decades, living on a precarious edge where a small push could sent her towards complete helplessness. She had come to the same conviction as Pratchett had, that it was better to chose the time of her death even if this would out of necessity earlier than it medically needed to be, than keep on living without hope for progress.

When the side effects of our kidney transplant started to become chronic, especially after the first or second time she had slipped into coma this became her worst fear, that she would wait too long to die and it would slip out of her control, that she might end up phsyically alive but mentally destroyed.

She had always been a fighter though and she saw no reason just then to give up, though it was hard on her. There were also her sons to consider, the eldest of which was in trouble we need get into right now what she needed — and did — sort out from her hospital bed and of course there was me. She didn’t want to leave us, but she knew there would be a time she had to.

Watching that Pratchett documentary in June of last year crystalised a lot of these things for her, as it did for me and we had some long, serious talks about what and how we would handle it if she did come to a point of no return. At the time actually she had started doing better, she would be out of hospital not too long after, come home and for a while it looked we finally had all the support we needed, that she was finally stabilising and moving back to a “normal” life, before it all came crashing down again in September.

And this time she had made up her mind. She stopped treatment, said her goodbyes and died, a year and a week ago. She died as she lived, in as full a control of her own destiny as she could get.

She would’ve done the same without Pratchett’s documentary, but it did make it easier for her, for us, to go through with it. It’s one more thing I have to thank him for: thanks to him we met and fell in love and thanks to him she could die with dignity.

Perhaps

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Perhaps some day the sun will shine again,
And I shall see that still the skies are blue,
And feel once more I do not live in vain,
Although bereft of You.

Perhaps the golden meadows at my feet
Will Make the sunny hours of Spring seem gay,
And I shall find the white May blossoms sweet,
Though You have passed away.

Perhaps the summer woods will shimmer bright,
And crimson roses once again be fair,
And Autumn harvest fields a rich delight,
Although You are not there.

Perhaps some day I shall not shrink in pain,
To see the passing of the dying year,
And listen to the Christmas songs again,
Although You cannot hear.

But, though kind Time may many joys renew,
There is one greatest joy I shall not know
Again, because my heart for loss of You
Was broken, long ago.

Perhaps (“To R. A. L. Died of Wounds in France, December 23rd 1915”) is a poem by Vera Brittain, composed after the death of her fiancé during the First World War. I came across it while reading Singled Out by Virginia Nicholson, a book about the “generation of spinsters” that war left in its wake in Britain. It seemed a fitting poem to mark the occasion of Sandra’s death a year ago today.

Books read October

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Eleven books read all together this month, largely made possible by rereading some eight Pratchett novels.

Natural History — Justina Robson
Humanity has split itself into a multitude of forms, better to colonise the Solar System with. Then one of the first interstellar human ships finds the remnants of an alien vessel and the secrets of FTL travel and nothing will be the same…

The Hydrogen Sonata — Iain M. Banks
This is the latest Culture novel and somewhat of a disappointment. Good, but not as good as the last one, with a bit of a copout ending.

The Case of the Gilded Fly — Edmund Crispin
The first of Crispin’s Gervase Fen’s mysteries, in which an excentric Oxford don (aren’t they all) solves murders. This one is marred by the lack of sympathy shown to the victim as well ae the mindgames Fen plays with the suspects and readers both.

The Colour of Magic, The Light Fantastic, Equal Rites, Mort, Sourcery, Wyrd Sisters, Pyramids, Guards! Guards! — Terry Pratchett
The first eight Discworld novels, read both because I wanted something comfortable to read as well as because I wanted to re-examine the early Discworld novels. Arguably, it’s in these eight novels that Pratchett matures as a writer and the Discworld is shaped; by the time of Guards! Guards! most of the major subseries have been established.

Grief

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The thing about grief is, that for me at last, it’s nothing like the grandstanding you see in movies or on tv. It’s not a great outpouring of emotion, no crying jags, no dramatic shakings of fists at uncaring heavens, just that dull, gnawing pain in the pit of your stomach, occasionally forgotten or unnoticed, but always there. It’s just there, whatever you do, churning.



It’s almost a year now since she died and it seems like forever. You slide deceptively easily back into your daily routines after that initial period of shock, just existing day to day, getting on with life. Yet that feeling remains at the edge of your consciousness that she’s just stepped out of the room, you could pick up the phone and call her, she’s still lying there in hospital if you’d care to visit. So many times during a day that you hear something or see something or read something you’d want to share and so many times you stop short, wait, you can’t do that anymore.



The worst comes at night. The worst always comes at night. All the suppressed anxieties of the day are expressed in dreams, part of the half familiar, half distored landscape of your subconsciousness. There she is, waiting and sometimes you know it’s a dream and she’s dead and sometimes you don’t, but the worst are those that you know but it had all been a mistake. That glimmer of hope you know is wrong and which evaporates when you wake up, setting you up nicely for yet another day.