‘Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant?’ by Roz Chast   a graphic memoir   (2014) –  228 pages

Can you imagine a graphic memoir that contains cartoon pictures of the writer’s aged parents just after they have died?  There are a whole series of pictures here of the author’s mother as she goes through the last stages before death.  Yes, the decline and ultimate death of one’s aging parents which is the subject of this book is unpleasant.  It is a natural part of life.

In this graphic memoir Roz Chast gives an honest account of her parents’ final days told from the perspective of a usually caring but sometimes exasperated daughter.

Both parents are in their nineties.  The two parents take different routes to their final destination.  He is prone to forgetting things, a touch of senile dementia which steadily increases.  The mother has mainly physical symptoms like high blood pressure, arthritis, and digestive ailments.  The mother has been and still is a demanding person, and the daughter still has unresolved issues with her from childhood.

The financial considerations are covered here too as she sees her parents’ life savings evaporate with the huge costs of assisted living.  Chast makes no attempt to prettify the whole aging and death process.   She throws in her own mixed feelings about her parents and their situation.  This openness about the subject of parental decline and death that has been shrouded in secrecy is refreshing.

The visuals really drove this story home for me.  As well as the cartoons which reminded me of Jules Feiffer in their loose style, Chast includes actual photographs from her childhood of her parents and herself.   In one ten-page section she shows us photographs of all the objects and clutter in her parents’ last home after they moved into assisted living.  Nearly all of it will be thrown away.

 “I began the massive, deeply weird, and heartbreaking job of going through my parents’ possessions – almost fifty years’ worth, crammed into four rooms.  If I wanted mementos, it was now or never.”

 The book even deals with what to do with the urns that contain her parents’ ash remains, a thorny problem.

In my own case, I was one of those offspring that left the immediate area where my parents lived, so I did not have to deal with all these aging parents’ problems.  I had a brother and sister-in-law that handled all of that for me.  ‘Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant?’ gave me a good idea of what it must have been like for them.