The day Terry Pratchett died, in 2015, my nine-year-old made a model of a bearded man in a big hat holding hands with Death. Few people have written as much about death as Pratchett. No one else has written about death in a way that would make a nine-year-old want to play with him. The Death who stalks Pratchett’s Discworld is a lonely, bewildered figure, unable to understand why he’s possibly not the ideal person to adopt a little girl, or why people are unsettled by the idea of him dressing up as Santa. But Death always gets you in the end. He got Pratchett through the back of his cerebral cortex and shrank his brain, something he referred to as “an embuggerance”.
Caring for someone who has dementia is an overwhelmingly vivid experience, full of pain and comedy. There are heartbreaking and funny stories in A Life With Footnotes – started by Pratchett himself but written and completed by his longtime assistant Rob Wilkins – about the things that Pratchett’s shrinking brain made him do. He once accidentally donated £50,000 to Bath Postal Museum, for instance. Moments like that can supplant your memories of what a person was like before; here, Wilkins, who started working for the author in 2000, attempts to recover Pratchett pre-dementia. His closeness to the subject means that the book is sometimes joyfully, sometimes painfully, intimate. The description of the day Pratchett’s daughter, Rhianna, was born, for example, is so animated by love, it’s as if this treasured moment was a jewel that Pratchett placed in Wilkins’s care, to ensure it would not be stolen away by the embuggerance.
