| Match It For Pratchett |
[Mar. 16th, 2008|07:29 pm] |
The more fannish among my readers will remember the announcement last December that Terry Pratchett had been diagnosted with early-onset Alzheimer's. He followed that earlier this week with a $1M donation to the Alzheimer's Research Trust in the UK. It didn't take too long for the idea of matching the donation to hit the blogosphere.
The announcement that Pterry had made his contribution hit my f'list on the first anniversary of Aunt Mary's passing. As those of you who were reading me then may recall, she was three weeks shy of her 99th birthday, and was blessed with a fully-functional body and brain until the very end. Her sister, my great-grandmother, was not so lucky...she spent her last five years on this earth descending into senile dementia, trapped inside her own mind for those final 18 months.
After Nana's passing, her daughter (my Grammy) stated on more than one occasion that she didn't want to "end up like her;" sadly, this became a self-fulfilling prophecy, and she has been in a residential facility specializing in Alzheimer's and dementia care for several years now. So it's no real surprise that I read the announcement, heard about the challenge, and found that my wallet felt a little heavy....
The drive to match Pterry's contribution now has its own home online - http://www.matchitforpratchett.org/ - and an RSS feed, available here as ![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/syndicated.gif) pratchettmatch. The site links to a shop where you can buy shirts with the logo featured in my icon, with all proceeds going to the Alzheimer's Research Trust; the site maintainer is collecting links for Alzheimer's charities around the world, if you want your money to stay closer to home. I made my own contribution to the Alzheimer's Association here in the US; if you plan on doing the same, I humbly suggest you use the Tribute link, and note that your contribution is in honor of Match It For Pratchett. It's not perfect (there's only room to note one honor/memorial, so you can't mention that AND a family member or friend), but it would be nice to see how many contributions the other organizations outside the UK receive. |
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