In this graphic novel, New Yorker cartoonist Roz Chast tells a heart-breaking story. If you're new to graphic novels, you might be surprised that they can be a very effective medium for dark material. Other excellent examples are Maus by Art Spiegelman and Fun Home by Alison Bechdel.
In Can't We Talk About Something More Pleasant? Chast sits us down to tell us the story of how her parents declined in health bit by bit until they died, first her father and then her mother. I felt her sitting me down on her couch and handing me a cup of tea while she explained to me in detail what it was like to realize that she was about to become the adult in the situation, and that as an only child, she was doing it alone. Her mother fell and ended up in the hospital, and this is one of the great mysteries of life to me. When an elderly person falls and breaks a bone, it seems to signal the beginning of the decline. Is it the decline that causes the fall, or does something in the fall accelerate the decline? Her mother clung to her independence and used all the emotional tools she had at her disposal to keep her father from standing up to her and insisting that it's time to consider giving up their apartment. At the same time, her father was starting to show signs of dementia. Finally Roz is able to convince her parents to just look at some facilities, then to just try moving in temporarily.
Roz has to navigate things like health insurance (her parents' insurance won't cover anything that doesn't happen in New York), and hiring a visiting nurse for her mother after her father is gone. I had a few moments that reminded me of when my grandmother and my mother were in the end stages of cancer that made me put the book down for a few minutes just to breathe. Like Roz's mother, who made less and less sense as time went on, my grandmother and I had a few visits after her cancer treatment stopped when she would start a sentence just fine but it would end in word salad. I did tell her that I'd met the man that I am still in a relationship with just a few months before and she told me, based on his first name and the fact that he had a job, that he sounds like, "such a fine man, such a good fine man, and you need to bring him to meet me as soon as you can." Sadly, that never happened, but I'd like to think she would have liked him even though he's not Italian. And like Roz, I also held my mom's hand on her last evening and told her that it really was OK to let go now. The hospice nurse in the book told Roz that sometimes people need to hear that. I don't know if my mother actually heard me, but it wasn't long after I told her that that she did let go. (Unlike Roz's mother, my mom was only 45.)
This book made it onto the list of 1000 Books You Must Read Before You Die, which is how I discovered it. I'd seen it on a shelf at a book store a few months before but honestly the cover didn't grab me and I didn't know what it was about. It just looked like a humor book about an adult child and her parents, which didn't feel compelling. I'm really glad I gave it a shot. If you have an elderly parent or have lived through the loss of a parent, it will hit you hard, but it will be worth it. Whenever anyone tells me that their mother died, I want to make sure they know that we're in the same boat. It feels important to talk about these things.
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