“Greg looks, aesthetically, like a really scary person. He’s got a bald head, he’s 6 ft 4 in, and he’s a big guy with tattoos. But as soon as he smiled, which he did all the time, you just knew.”
Ten years ago, new to Yellowknife, Chrissie Carrigan met Greg Pratt at a house party. She was struck by his looks, sure, but mostly by his effortless ability to be funny.
Everything else seemed effortless, too. To anyone he met, Greg was somehow immediately approachable, capable not just of a conversation but of caring about any life he touched.
As he pursued and achieved his dream of becoming a city firefighter, Greg emerged as what younger colleagues termed the “fun uncle of the fire hall” – but also a big brother who could handle every problem and help you handle yours.
Even confronted by a terminal diagnosis and given years to live, Greg absorbed the life-changing news in a way that brought strength and calm to his friends and loved ones.
“You can see it in how he handled all of this – he handled it with such grace,” said one of his closest friends, Dave de Lugt.
“Two weeks ago, he was still driving fundraising for Movember, even knowing that the decision had been made to stop chemotherapy. That speaks volumes.”
Greg passed away on Tuesday, December 12, at the age of 48, two years after being diagnosed with a rare type of bile duct cancer.
A celebration of life will take place from 4:30-8pm on Sunday, December 17 at Yellowknife’s multiplex gym, with a ceremony from 5-6pm. Anyone unable to attend in person can watch the ceremony online.
A future celebration of life will take place in Victoria, BC in the spring. In lieu of gifts, Greg has asked for donations to the NWT SPCA in his honour.
Wild and free
Gregory Michael Pratt was born on May 21, 1975 in Edmonton. He lived multiple lives.
Growing up in Nanaimo and then Victoria, friends could already see the Greg that everyone knew in Yellowknife – the one who didn’t care what others thought, the one who reached his own verdict on people.
“That’s how he and I became such good friends,” said Mike Ferguson, who, as a 15-year-old, felt joined at the hip to Greg from the moment they met.
“When I moved to Victoria, I had no friends. It was uncool, at school, to be friends with me. But Greg didn’t give a shit about that,” Ferguson said.
The two spent their weekends throwing camping gear in a truck and exploring the west coast. Mystic Beach, now connected to the Juan de Fuca Trail but back then accessible only if you slogged through rainforest, became one of Greg’s favourite places on Earth.
“We would skimboard and play in the ocean and the beaches, and just be wild and free,” Ferguson said. “We’d be there for four or five days at a time, and almost nobody else would be there.”
At the same time, this was a Greg that Yellowknifers didn’t see so much: the one constantly in trouble and, eventually, the one living with addiction.
“He was his own worst enemy for setting himself up for getting caught,” remembered his older brother, Brad, who fought with Greg practically daily as kids.
“There was a time when Greg really did have to turn his life around, a time when we weren’t sure – many of us thought we were going to lose him to drugs.”
Greg came through, and he brought others with him – including Ferguson.
“Greg turned his life around before I did, and I dug the bottom deeper. I spent some time on the street in Kelowna. Greg came and saw me there, then I moved back and he came and dumped my apartment upside down, making sure I wasn’t using and making sure I was doing all the things I needed to do to turn my life around,” Ferguson recalled.
“He cared. He put himself in awkward situations with me because he cared about my life more than my feelings – and it made a huge difference.
“Like, I have a 12-year-old son who’s never known me drunk. I have so much in my life, and he made such a huge impact. I can’t look at any successful area of my life without seeing his mark on it.”
A firefighter and a friend
Firefighting was his dream.
Greg became a Red Seal cabinet-maker as he reinvented himself, a skill that would dazzle Yellowknife friends, but that wasn’t the job that drove him.
Having once worked as a medic in the oil field around Fort St John, Greg ultimately moved to Arctic Response, the Yellowknife-based survival and safety group.
That’s where he met De Lugt, who was struck both by Greg’s steady hand, no matter the situation, and by his ambition.
“He was very clear that he wanted to become a firefighter in town,” De Lugt said.
Greg became a paid on-call firefighter and, when the chance finally arose to join Yellowknife’s fire hall on a permanent basis, his colleagues were as thrilled as he was.
“You could tell he was not just here for a little bit of an experience. He was chasing a dream,” said longtime Yellowknife firefighter Christian Bittrolff, who is also president of the city firefighters’ union.
He was a new firefighter as he entered his 40s, an unusual age at which to join the profession.
“I remember doing ride-alongs and he would be there reading policies at two in the morning,” said Mackinley Moore, a 26-year-old firefighter.
“He didn’t have a chip on his shoulder, he just put his head down and worked. A lot of people don’t have a big career change like he did at his age, and to just embrace it the way he did was very impressive.”
Moore was a teenager on a form of fire hall internship when he first met Greg.
“When you’re 16 and you go into a room of full-grown men, it’s pretty intimidating, but he made us feel like we were part of the team. He made us feel included,” he said.
“He didn’t care about your age. He treated you like you were a friend.”
That mentorship extended beyond the fire hall.
Moore and Chance Patterson, another firefighter and a neighbour, increasingly spent their time with Greg, fixing his house, fishing or snowmobiling.
“He definitely was in charge of all the projects – he knew how to do everything – but he would let you learn your own way and then just make sure you did it right,” said Patterson.
“He was super humble about how good he was,” said Moore.
“Neither of us had any real trade experience and you’ve got this guy who used to do this for a living. And he’s like, ‘You guys are doing great. That looks great.’ You’d make something and you’d show it to him all proud, and it didn’t matter how botched it was, he’d sit there and be like, ‘Man, that’s awesome.’
“He was the ultimate mentor. He didn’t want money, he didn’t want anything else, he just wanted to make sure you actually knew how to do it.”
“He’s one of the most selfless people I’ve ever known,” said De Lugt. “Any house projects, he’s always the first person to show up with all of the tools – and if he doesn’t have them, he’ll go and get the rest of them to do the job for you. And he’ll never expect anything in return.”
Coping with the diagnosis
For a man with so many skills and so much to say, Greg’s real trick was listening.
“He was the type of person that everybody felt they could open up to,” recalled Carrigan, who became his partner of 10 years. They were married on April 24, 2022 at their home.
“So many big, burly men and women and people from different walks of life felt like they could talk to him about anything,” she said.
“He was really open about his own feelings and his own vulnerabilities, thoughts and experiences. I think that made people feel like they could be, too.”
His brother, Brad, said that showed in the extraordinary size of his friend group, even from a young age. House parties were out of the question – the sheer number of people meant you needed a separate venue.
“He’s still friends with a huge portion of his elementary school class. I’ve never seen anything like it before, the circle of friends in his coming-of-age years. It was staggering, and they’re all still so close,” his brother said.
“He was the hub. Some people have places for hubs, and we had Greg,” said Ferguson.
“Greg lived life to the fullest and he didn’t do it recklessly. He was considerate of everyone around him – what he did, how it impacted people. Greg put a very, very concerted effort into improving himself as a human being and how he could leave anywhere he went in better condition than he found it. He was absolutely authentic.”
That made friends all the more taken aback by his 2021 diagnosis. It felt crushingly unfair. Then they saw how Greg handled his latest life, even as his illness nearly killed him in early 2022.
“I don’t think I’ve ever seen anybody handle such devastating news quite as positively as he did,” said Bittrolff.
“We knew from the very beginning that he’d have three to five years to live, if we were lucky,” said Carrigan. “That was the best-case scenario.”
Recovering from his 2022 scare, Greg plunged into the things that sustained him: friends, his relationship with Chrissie, building things and having experiences. (De Lugt recalls this was the time that Greg played “the best nine holes of his life.”)
The couple finished their project to transform an old school bus, bought for $600 off a Yellowknife lot, into a beautiful, minimalist, functional camper van. They renovated practically the entire house. They departed on a months-long tour of places Greg wanted to see, visiting the likes of Sardinia, Sicily, France, Italy, Slovenia and Croatia.
Though Greg had been stable and cleared to pause his treatment at the trip’s outset, stomach pains emerged in Albania and the two came home early.
This time, treatment came with side effects that made him really ill, Carrigan said. Eventually, in conversation with doctors, Greg decided to end treatment that, even if it bought him extra time, might have simply made that time miserable.
The year before, the couple had set up the paperwork needed for medical assistance in dying, a step that Greg felt gave him some agency – some control, some dignity – in a treatment process that was often bewildering.
“It’s been hard, because the decline feels really fast,” said Carrigan, who shared news of Greg’s passing online with a photo of him atop a mountain in Montenegro just two months earlier.
“We knew this was the eventual outcome. You know it’s coming, but somehow it comes and it still feels awful and shocking.”
“Even though this all feels very sudden, and it escalates very quickly, it would always be too soon,” said De Lugt. “Even if we had another two years with him, it would be too soon.”
Space to be
Greg passed away on Tuesday in the company of Chrissie, Brad, his mother and close family, having welcomed a stream of friends in the days prior.
His legacy is that of selflessness.
“It’s terrible losing him,” said De Lugt, “but his grace has taught me a lot about how I should strive to be. He was always ready to give every person a chance.”
“Greg helped me get sober,” said Ferguson. “Greg helped me turn my life around. He was one of the few people who never gave up on me.”
“We, like most brothers, started out wanting to kill each other,” said Brad. “He became my very best friend.”
Patterson saw the same Greg in the past two years that he saw face every fire.
“He made the best of all these horrible situations that we were in together, and that he went through himself,” he said.
“I think that’ll be his legacy, how he treated everyone and how he handled himself, even through the hardest times of his life.”
Carrigan found in Greg someone who helped her to thrive.
“He embodied the spirit of accepting people for who they are, and being open and loving to them,” she said.
“The best part about our relationship was that we were so independent. We let each other grow and change. We evolved through careers, friends, hobbies and interests, and we always gave space to each other to be able to explore those, and be who we wanted to be in that moment.
“We accepted each other fully for who each other was, and I think that’s something he taught me. He made me feel safe, loved, and like I could do anything.”
