“Do you not know that a man is not dead while his name is still spoken?”

This morning I woke up and read that Terry Pratchett died as he wished, at home with his family. It’s been a terrible winter, but it wasn’t until this morning that I cried, for the loss of future Pratchett books and his imagination and his company in the world inside my brain where all the people I love live. There are more people in there than are in my real life, not just the people I’ve lost in the past, but the people books have brought to me. For Pratchett, that means Susan and Vimes and Moist and Lady Sybil and the Luggage; they’re all real inside the L-space of my mind. In fact, I have an L-space in my mind because of Terry Pratchett. The disease that attacked him is vile and vicious, but he took back his life from it and met another of my favorite characters on his own terms. My life is richer because his books were part of it; the future is poorer because he’s gone. But I also believe that what he wrote in Going Postal is true, that as long as his name is spoken and his books are read, he’s not gone. And his name will be spoken in libraries and bookstores forever.

He was just that wonderful.