Monthly Archives: April 2008

Terry Pratchett has one of the sharpest pens of all. I have loved his books ever since I first discovered Good Omens on the back shelf of a little bookstore during a break in classes around my first year of college. I wish I had discovered him sooner.

I have been a little slow in writing this, because the news has left me shocked and extremely saddened. Terry Pratchett has been diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimers. (Click here to read his speech)

I have had my own personal experiences with this disease, with two aunts dying with Alzheimers and my grandmother currently in a nursing home suffering from it. I have personally seen the toll it takes not only on the person with the disease, but on the caregivers and family. I have watched government policies remove the possibility of pursuing avenues of research most likely to present a treatment, if not a cure, for this disease. Funding for research remains low, when compared to other diseases, and as diseases go, there are few more debilitating than this. Mr. Pratchett writes that he’d “like a chance to die like my father did – of cancer, at 86 . . . He talked to us right up to the last few days, knowing who we were and who he was.”

And yet, compared to the funding for cancer, Alzheimers research is severely limited. Mr. Pratchett donated one million dollars to Alzheimers research, and is on a campaign to raise awareness of the disease. Until Alzheimers becomes something that is talked about, something, like cancer, for people to fear, funding, both by government and through donations, will remain low.

Not only have I watched my grandmother – the woman who taught me to write and to love good home cooking and walks in the woods – gradually lose herself to the point that she can no longer complete a sentence, I have also had to watch my grandfather, as her primary caregiver and devoted husband of more than 60 years, drop into a deep depression due to watching this woman he loves in such a sharp decline.

Today, my grandmother barely knows who I am, or her other grandchildren, or even her daughters. She can still tell you, though, if my grandfather has been in to see her that day, and will ask where he is if he hasn’t.

So I thank you, Terry, for your donations and your work. Thank you from the people who cannot do as much, the people who, like my grandmother, have lost the ability to speak for themselves, and for the caregivers who have to watch their loved ones become shadows and ghosts of what they once were. My heart is with you as you battle this disease, as it has travelled with you through Discworld so many times before.

(Link to donate to the Alzheimers Research Trust: https://www.committedgiving.uk.net/art/public/donor.aspx?id=cc)