My father and Terry Pratchett

[lolmac]

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.

Comments

[dbskyler]

What a wonderful connection between your father and Terry Pratchett. Your father really did leave a great legacy just in that one act.

I'm glad it brings you comfort, even if it's a weird comfort.

[lolmac]

*hugs back* Thank you.

[lost_spook]

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

♥ It should be a comfort - and Sir Terry isn't the only one he'll have helped. My Granny had Alzheimers (not early onset) for 13 years, from about 1992 & it was awful. My great-uncle had it more recently and with that drug, it's still hard, but he's been able to keep doing so much more and remain himself for so much longer than my Granny could.

[lolmac]

I learned about the Aricept late last year, when I was reading A Slip of the Keyboard, and I'm not ashamed to admit that I sobbed. I had known about Sir Terry's Alzheimer's for years, and took it to heart, but I hadn't known he was taking Aricept. It put a sudden, human, astonishingly personal face on it all -- before then, I had known intellectually that all these people around the world were being helped just that little bit, but they had no sharply defined identity.

[catsittingstill]

Your dad did a wonderful thing. I am grateful to him.

[lolmac]

Thank you! Many others were part of it, of course, but I didn't know any of them . . .

[liadtbunny]

I'm glad you have some comfort, even if it's weird x

[lolmac]

Thank you *hugs*

I still miss my parents.

[liadtbunny]

Bless you *hugs*

[thothmes]

People all over the world who never knew him, have precious memories, precious time with their family that your dad bought for them with his willingness to accept risk. It is a beautiful legacy. It won't share a joke with you or commiserate with your losses and cheer on your successes, but for a scientist, it is a very fitting memory.

On a far more banal note, I have a favorite picture of my dad as the lock screen on my iPad. I usually open the thing in portrait orientation, and wave him a mental hello. Today, for the first time, I was holding the thing in landscape as I opened. Oh dear! Dad crotch shot. Perhaps I will change it back to the photo of 25 year old Dad and 3 year old Thothmes on his lap at the brook in the Adirondacks.

I think often of what you said to me when he died about how lucky we are to have so much to mourn. It's the type of remark that one understands at once, but absorbs slowly. We are indeed so, so lucky. Words of comfort that grow, unfold, and warm the heart more and more through time. Thank you, so very

[lolmac]

As part of the overall research, all of us (my siblings and me, that is) sent blood samples to a center in Texas that does studies on families, especially families with a single outlier patient. (Dad was and still is the only instance of Alzheimer's in the bloodline that we know of, knock wood that it remains so.) Did you know it's actually rather hard to get blood samples sent through ordinary means? Especially when it's supposed to be kept at a low temperature and transported as fast as possible? If the lab hadn't coordinated the whole thing, I'm sure we wouldn't have been able to manage it. All I had to do was take the paperwork to my doctor, have them draw the sample (a couple of good-sized vials), and leave them to wrangle it from there

[thothmes]

I simply don't understand how that is a sick way of thinking about it. You were seeing it the way he would have and were understanding that all was as close to how he would have wanted it as possible under the circumstances. People need to be cherished, honored, and remembered for who they are. There are people I've known that were certain that they would be going to be with God, an eternity of adoration and bliss. I try hard for them to think of them that way, although I myself have always thought that Dante's Inferno was the interesting section, his Paradiso the dull one, and neither to be what we will get. I have known others who feel that they were here before and will be here again, that it is all just continual skin shedding. My family tends to the and then you die and there is nothing, because you have ceased to exist theory. The idea is to honor them in the way they would wish, and cherish the time you have together

[lolmac]

As I recall, they were already squicked at the thought of Dad's brain being donated, and they didn't understand how I could joke about the whole thing (clearly, the comment about being reincarnated as research data was a joke). Then, too, with Alzheimer's little known and less understood, it wasn't a comfy subject. I was also using the d-word, horrors. (As I recall, this was when I suddenly realized that I hate the phrase "passed away", so there I was, telling people that my father had died, and I had seen his dead body. Six months later, I was telling people that my mother had also died. Quite unreclaimable.)

In fact, I not only saw his body: he was cremated after the autopsy, so I saw his body without it having been prettied up by a mortician. It was the first actual dead body I had ever seen. This is one of the reasons that I insisted on seeing him, and went to considerable lengths to do so. I'm still very glad I did; it was tremendously important. It's hard to articulate why, but it was.