Can't We Talk About Something More Pleasant?

I've been enjoying Roz Chast's cartoons in The New Yorker for years. Mostly they are depictions of the average person in an average living room--an overstuffed sofa, an antimacassar, a table lamp, and bad wallpaper--struggling against the inanities of life.

In Can't We Talk About Something More Pleasant?, Chast gets personal. In this memoir, presented mostly in comic book form, with some photos and straight text, she tells the simultaneously sad and funny story of how she dealt with her parents in their final years. I have yet to deal with with my own parents in this manner, but some of it resonated with stories about my grandmothers, and there is a kind of universal truth about it--the children and parents swap roles, especially the older they get.

Chast is from Brooklyn, which Woody Allen called "the heart of the old world," and indeed her parents are old world. The children of immigrants, they are hoarders of a kind, and deniers of another. The title refers to the deflection when Chast ever attempts a conversation about what to do about their elderly status.

Chast's mother, Elizabeth, is the dominating one, who is prone to rages signaled by the words, "I am about to blow my top!" Her father, George, is the meeker one, who never learned to drive, is afraid to change a light bulb, and who chews each bite of food forty times. But the two parents are devoted, and after meeting in high school never dated anyone else, and will have a seventy-year marriage.

Eventually the reach their nineties. George has senile dementia, and when Elizabeth has to go to the hospital (she falls from a ladder changing a light bulb he won't) he's beside himself, as Chast has to tell him every so often that Mommy is in the hospital, because he forgets. His anxieties (especially about bank books, some to accounts in banks that no longer exist) drive Chast bats, but then she feels guilty about it.

It has become time to move them out of their apartment in Brooklyn, where they've lived for almost fifty years. Chast finds them a retirement home ("the Place") near her in Connecticut. The cost is huge--$14,000 a month--not covered by insurance, because incredibly their insurance didn't transfer from New York to Connecticut (who wants to go back to that?) We then get a very amusing section as Chast, an only child, has to clean out their place, taking what she wants and then telling the landlord to sell or throw out the window the rest.

After he too falls, his health declines. He gets bedsores, which is unpleasant to think about, and is in great pain, and wants out, but Elizabeth is determined to put on a happy face and urge him on. But he dies at the age of 95. Elizabeth recovers somewhat, but then her health declines, too, and she too has dementia, telling Chast some wild stories, such as how her mother-in-law tried to kill her several times, Here is the text of one:

Elizabeth: Your father died before you were born--when I was pregnant with you. My father, Harry, said he would buy me a house, and he would live with us and babysit you while I was at work.

Roz: Mom, that's not true.

Elizabeth: Yes it is, and I SHOULD KNOW!

Elizabeth eventually fades, at the age of 97, bed-ridden and eating almost nothing but Ensure. Chast, who got along much better with her father, has complicated feelings about her mother, and I defy anyone not to get choked up when she relates one of their last conversations, when she asks her mother why she wasn't more of a friend to her. But then, in their very last conversation, they exchange "I love you's."

At the end of the book are Chast's drawings (she didn't know what else to do) of her mother's last days, and then postmortem. She closes with a few heart-wrenching paragraphs, first about her parents cremains, that are in her closet: "I like having my parents in my closet. The thought of burying their cremains in an arbitrary hole in the ground does not appeal to me. We don't have a family plot, so choosing one cemetery over another seems random. Throwing their ashes off the side of a boat makes as much sense to me as tossing them in a wastebasket at Starbucks. And decanting them into a decorative urn placed on the mantelpiece in the living is room is just...ugh."

Then, "Even though he often drove me bats, I remember my dad with great affection. In my heart of hearts, I feel as if he and I were kindred spirits. I'm still working things out with my mother. Sometimes I want to go back in time and warn her, 'Don't do that! If you're mean to her (me) again, you'll lose her forever! It's not worth it!!!' Obviously, I can't."

I haven't even mentioned the drawings, which are often delightful, full of odd little details (such as identifying objects by little word balloons). I really like the way she depicts angst, anger, or other extreme motions by her people rendered in wavy lines, as if their very bodies were coming apart at the seams.

It seems that children taking care of their elderly parents is going to be something that almost everyone can relate to. Fortunately my parents are in pretty good health and have all their marbles, and I have three siblings to share the burden. If this book is any judge, it's quite a roller coaster ride.