The 28th of April would have been Terry Pratchett's 76th birthday--it is always amazing to me how young he was. Of all the various deaths of notable people throughout the years, his is the death that most affected me, in no small part because I carried (and still carry) so much of his work with me.
I first learned about Terry Pratchett because I played Nethack. This isn't actually that remarkable for me: this is also how I got into Tolkien's works (though this happened much earlier). You see, when you look up a monster in the in-game encyclopedia, it will often provide a quote from a notable work of fantasy fiction, and The Color of Magic and The Lord of the Rings were both in there quite a few times, as you might expect, and the quotes in them were cool. And I thought the titles were cool, and that was enough to get me interested. I went to the local bookstore and looked at their selection, which seemed unfathomably vast (but was not, I learned later, even half of what he had available), and picked up a copy of Guards, Guards!, because I loved the idea of a story focusing on these characters that are nameless and faceless in other stories. The guards, the ones that get summoned by named, important characters. I loved it. Then I went back and bought The Color of Magic, and Thief of Time because my whole fixation on criminals and rogues has been going on since at least high school.
Then I received a gift card for Amazon (which, at the time, was just a bookstore), and bought as many Discworld books as I could.
I must have been . . . oh, probably eighteen? I'd just moved out of my dad's house, and these books were absolutely enthralling. I was drawn in by the fun satire of genre fiction and the exquisitely crafted prose and humor, and ended up falling in love with the amazing characters and the profound heart Pratchett demonstrates consistently--his deep love of the misfit and the outcast and the downtrodden, and, despite everything, for humanity.
I latched onto that especially as someone who had only just recently escaped fundamentalist Christianity. Pratchett's worldview and message spoke to me, and gave me something to aspire towards, and showed me that I wasn't alone. As you can imagine, that meant a lot--probably more than I realized at the time. He provided an anchor in a turbulent time, and that helped me stay on course, I think.
And these characters and this world living rent-free in my brain certainly shaped my writing style, sometimes in ways that I was conscious of and probably in many more ways I wasn't--even today Pratchett's books make up a meaningful plurality of the books I have read for pleasure--and gave me a deep appreciation for the potential of genre fiction to provide just as much meaning and depth and artistry as the most highly esteemed works of literary fiction. Stories matter.
There is a tendency, when reflecting on those we have lost, to wonder what could have been: the stories he would have told, if he only had more time. And, yes, it is a loss, and there would have been more, but I feel that it is important not to diminish the works that do exist, that we still have, by focusing instead on the hypothetical. It is an immeasurable gift that Terry Pratchett lived, and wrote these wonderful stories, and a greater gift still that he dedicated so much of his life and energy on reminding us that people matter. And I know that my life is better for having discovered his works when I did.