“My Life, My Death, My Choice”

by Andy Dayton, associate web producer

In December 2007, British fantasy writer Sir Terry Pratchett publicly announced that he had been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease. Primarily known for his best-selling Discworld series of fantasy novels, he has now become a vocal advocate for the right to “early death.”

The video above is from Pratchett’s speech, “Shaking Hands with Death,” for the BBC’s annual Richard Dimbleby Lecture. Early on in the speech — delivered by actor Tony Robinson due to Pratchett’s condition — he tells the story of his father’s death from pancreatic cancer:

“On the day he was diagnosed my ­father told me, ‘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.”

In the clip above, Pratchett addresses what he calls “the God argument” and identifies himself as a humanist who “would rather believe that we were a rising ape, not a falling angel.” He finishes with this thought:

“It’s that much-heralded thing called the quality of life that’s important. How you live your life, what you get out of it, what you put into it, and what you leave behind after it. We should aim for a good and rich life well-lived. And at the end of it, in the comfort of our own home, in the company of those who love us, have a death worth dying for.”

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