Vancouver Island writer Alicia Priest has died after a three-year struggle with a progressive neurodegenerative disease.

Priest, 61, died early January 13 in a Victoria hospice in the company of her husband, writer Ben Parfitt, and their daughter, Charlotte.

She had been diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (also known as ALS or Lou Gehrig’s disease) in November 2011 and spent much of her remaining time writing a book about her childhood and her father, A Rock Fell on the Moon: Dad and the Great Yukon Silver Ore Heist, which was released by Harbour Publishing last September.

The book, which debuted to good reviews and hit the B.C. bestseller list, concerns her father’s part in a celebrated theft of silver ore from a remote Yukon mine in 1963 and the effect his conviction and imprisonment had on her and her family.

After leaving the hamlet of Elsa for East Vancouver with her mother and sister, Priest attended John Oliver high school and UBC, where she studied anthropology.

Priest became a registered nurse, travelled, then turned to journalism and, later, freelance writing and radio documentaries. She wrote on health and health-policy issues for the Vancouver Sun (where Parfitt was a beat forestry reporter until he, too, quit to become a freelancer, penning many award-winning feature stories for the Georgia Straight).

Her work appeared in the Straight, Vancouver Magazine, the Globe and Mail, Western Living, CBC Radio’s Quirks and Quarks, and the Canadian Medical Association Journal, among others, and she won or was nominated for several Western Magazine Awards between 2000 and 2003 for her Straight features.

After her diagnosis, which she called her “ultimate deadline”, she wrote an article about her experiences with ALS, called “The Cookie Crumbles” (read it here).