Decline And Death: "Can't We Talk About Something More Pleasant?"

New Yorker Cartoonist Roz Chast's Remarkable Illustrated Meditation on Aging, Illness, and Death

"Each day, we wake slightly altered, and the person we were yesterday is dead," John Updike wrote in his magnificent memoir. "So why, one could say, be afraid of death, when death comes all the time?" It's a sentiment somewhat easier to swallow – though certainly not without its ancient challenge – when it comes to our own death, but when that of our loved ones skulks around, it's invariably devastating and messy, and it catches us painfully unprepared no matter how much time we've had to "prepare."

Count on another beloved New Yorker contributor, cartoonist Roz Chast, to address this delicate and doleful subject with equal parts wit and wisdom in Can't We Talk about Something More Pleasant?: A Memoir(public library) – a remarkable illustrated chronicle of her parents' decline into old age and death, pierced by those profound, strangely uplifting in-between moments of cracking open the little chests of truth we keep latched shut all our lives until a brush with our mortal impermanence rattles the lock and lets out some understanding, however brief and fragmentary, of the great human mystery of what it means to live.

The humor and humility with which Chast tackles the enormously difficult subject of aging, illness and death is nothing short of a work of genius.

But besides appreciating Chast's treatment of such grand human themes as death, duty, and "the moving sidewalk of life," I was struck by how much her parents resembled my own – her father, just like mine, a "kind and sensitive" man of above-average awkwardness, "the spindly type," inept at even the basics of taking care of himself domestically, with a genius for languages; her mother, just like mine, a dominant and hard-headed perfectionist "built like a fire hydrant," with vanquished dreams of becoming a professional pianist, an unpredictable volcano of anger. ("Where my father was tentative and gentle," Chast writes, "she was critical and uncompromising." And: "Even though I knew he couldn't really defend me against my mother's rages, I sensed that at least he felt some sympathy, and that he liked me as a person, not just because I was his daughter.")

Chast, like myself, was an only child and her parents, like mine, had a hard time understanding how their daughter made her living given she didn't run in the 9-to-5 hamster wheel of working for the man. There were also the shared family food issues, the childhood loneliness, the discomfort about money that stems from having grown up without it.

The point here, of course, isn't to dance to the drum of solipsism. (Though we only children seem particularly attuned to its beat.) It's to appreciate the elegance and bold vulnerability with which Chast weaves out of her own story a narrative at once so universally human yet so relatable in its kaleidoscope of particularities that any reader is bound to find a piece of him- or herself in it, to laugh and weep with the bittersweet relief of suddenly feeling less alone in the most lonesome-making of human struggles, to find some compassion for even the most tragicomic of our faults.

From reluctantly visiting her parents in the neighborhood where she grew up ("not the Brooklyn of artists or hipsters or people who made – and bought – $8 chocolate bars [but] DEEP Brooklyn") as their decline began, to accepting just as reluctantly the basic facts of life ("Old age didn't change their basic personalities. If anything, it intensified what was already there."), to witnessing her father's mental dwindling ("One of the worst parts of senility must be that you have to get terrible news over and over again. On the other hand, maybe in between the times of knowing the bad news, you get to forget it and live as if everything was hunky-dory."), to the self-loathing brought on by the clash between the aspiration of a loving daughter and the financial strain of elder care ("I felt like a disgusting person, worrying about the money."), Chast treks with extraordinary candor and vulnerability through the maze of her own psyche, mapping out our own in the process.

Chast also explores, with extraordinary sensitivity and self-awareness, the warping of identity that happens when the cycle of life and its uncompromising realities toss us into roles we always knew were part of the human journey but somehow thought we, we alone, would be spared. She writes:

It's really easy to be patient and sympathetic with someone when it's theoretical, or only for a little while. It's a lot harder to deal with someone's craziness when it's constant, and that person is your dad, the one who's supposed to be taking care of YOU.

But despite her enormous capacity for wit and humor even in so harrowing an experience, Chast doesn't stray too far from its backbone of deep, complicated love and paralyzing grief. The book ends with Chast's raw, unfiltered sketches from the final weeks she spent in the hospice ward where her mother took her last breath. A crystalline realization suddenly emerges that Chast's cartooning isn't some gimmicky ploy for quick laughs but her most direct access point to her own experience, her best sensemaking mechanism for understanding the world, life and, inevitably, death.

Can't We Talk about Something More Pleasant? is an absolutely astounding read in its entirety – the kind that enters your soul through the backdoor, lightly, and touches more parts of it and more heavinesses than you ever thought you'd allow. You're left, simply, grateful.