Terry Pratchett (1948-2015)
Filed under the name Terry · March 18, 2026
Terry Pratchett's later chapter is the one that stays with me most, because I've spent 28 years sitting with families as illness changes who someone is, and his public honesty about Alzheimer's did something rare — it let people laugh and grieve about the same disease in the same breath. That's a very difficult balance, and it's the exact balance I try to strike every day in hospice work: you don't have to choose between humor and heaviness, and pretending otherwise usually makes both harder to bear. Before any of that, of course, he built an entire beloved fantasy world in the Discworld books out of wit sharp enough to survive being read for decades, which tells me the same mind that could imagine an absurd universe could also look unflinchingly at his own decline and describe it clearly for other people's benefit. I'm Catholic and think about illness and mortality in spiritual terms more than most of my colleagues do, but I recognize real grace when I see it, however it's dressed, and his was dressed in comedy most of the time.