I’m sure you know that, for my sins, which I wish I could remember because they must have been crimson, I am effectively “Mr. Alzheimer’s” and I have given more interviews on the subject than I can remember. But there are others, less well known, who have various forms of dementia and go out and about being ambassadors for the Alzheimer’s Society in their fight against the wretched disease. It’s not just me, by a long way. They are unsung heroes and I salute them.
When I was a young boy, playing on the floor of my grandmother’s front room, I glanced up at the television and saw death, talking to a knight, and I didn’t know very much about death at that point. It was the thing that happened to budgerigars and hamsters. But it was Death, with a scythe and an amiable manner. I didn’t know it at the time, of course, but I had just watched a clip from Bergman’s Seventh Seal, wherein the Knight engages in protracted dialogue, and of course the famous chess game, with the Grim Reaper who, it seemed to me, did not seem so terribly grim.
The image has remained with me ever since and Death as a character appeared in the very first of my Discworld novels. He has evolved in the series to be one of its most popular characters; implacable, because that is his job, he nevertheless appears to have some sneaking regard and compassion for a race of creatures which are to him as ephemeral as mayflies, but which nevertheless spend their brief lives making rules for the universe and counting the stars. He is, in short, a kindly Death, cleaning up the mess that this life leaves, and opening the gate to the next one. Indeed, in some religions he is an angel.
People have written to me about him from convents, ecclesiastical palaces, funeral parlours and. not least, hospices. The letters I’ve had from people all around the world have sometimes made me give up writing for the day and take a long walk. It is touching, and possibly worrying that people will write, with some difficulty, a six-page letter to an author they have never met, and include in it sentiments that I very much doubt they would share with their doctor.
I have no clear recollection of the death of my grandparents, but my paternal grandfather died in the ambulance on the way to hospital just after having cooked and eaten his own dinner at the age of ninety-six. (It turned out, when we found his birth certificate, that he was really ninety-four, but he was proud of being ninety-six, so I hope that no celestial being was kind enough to disillusion him.)
He had felt very odd, got a neighbour to ring for the doctor, and stepped tidily into the ambulance and out of the world. He died on the way to the hospital—a good death if ever there was one. Except that, according to my father, he did complain to the ambulance men that he hadn’t had time to finish his pudding. I am not at all sure about the truth of this, because my father had a finely tuned sense of humour which he was good enough to bequeath to me, presumably to make up for the weak bladder, the short stature, and the male-pattern baldness, which regrettably came with the package.
My father’s own death was more protracted. He had a year’s warning. It was pancreatic cancer. Technology kept him alive, at home and in a state of reasonable comfort and cheerfulness for that year, during which we had those conversations that you have with a dying parent. Perhaps it is when you truly get to know them, when you realize that it is now you marching towards the sound of the guns and you are ready to listen to the advice and reminiscences that life was too crowded for up to that point. He unloaded all the anecdotes that I had heard before, about his time in India during the war, and came up with a few more that I had never heard. As with so many men of his generation, his wartime service was never far from his recollection. Then, at one point, he suddenly looked up and said, “I can feel the sun of India on my face,” and his face did light up rather magically, brighter and happier than I had seen it at any time in the previous year and if there had been any justice or even narrative sensibility in the universe, he would have died there and then, shading his eyes from the sun of Karachi.
He did not.
On the day he was diagnosed my father told me, and I quote: “If you ever see me in a hospital bed, full of tubes and pipes and no good to anybody, tell them to switch me off.”
In fact, it took something under a fortnight in the hospice for him to die as a kind of collateral damage in the war between his cancer and the morphine. And in that time he stopped being him and started becoming a corpse, albeit one that moved ever so slightly from time to time.
There wasn’t much I could have done, and since the nurses in the Welsh hospice were fine big girls, perhaps that was just as well. I thank them now for the geriatric cat that was allowed to roam the wards and kept me and my mother company as we awaited the outcome. Feline though it was, and also slightly smelly, with a tendency to grumble, it was a touch of humanity in the long reaches of the night.
On the way back home after my father’s death I scraped my Jag along a stone wall in Hay-on-Wye. To be fair, it’s almost impossible not to scrape Jags along the walls in Hay-on-Wye even if your eyes aren’t clouded with tears, but what I didn’t know at the time, yet strongly suspect now, was that also playing a part in that little accident was my own disease, subtly making its presence felt. Alzheimer’s creeps up very gently over a long period of time, possibly decades, and baby boomers like myself know that we are never going to die so always have an explanation ready for life’s little hiccups. We say, “I’ve had a senior moment. Ha! Ha!” We say, “Everybody loses their car keys.” We say, “Oh, I do that, too. I often go upstairs and forget what I have come up for!” We say, “I often forget someone’s name midsentence,” and thus we are complicit in one another’s determination not to be mortal. We like to believe that if all of us are growing old, none of us are growing old.
I have touch-typed since I was thirteen, but now that was going wrong. I got new spectacles. I bought a better keyboard, not such a bad idea since the old one was full of beard hairs and coffee, and finally at the end of self-delusion I went to see my GP. Slightly apologetically she gave me the standard Alzheimer’s test, with such taxing questions as “What day of the week is it?” and then sent me off locally for a scan. The result? I didn’t have Alzheimer’s. My condition was simply wear and tear on the brain caused by the passage of time that “happens to everybody.” Old age, in short. I thought, well, I’ve never been fifty-nine before and so this must be how it is.