By BRAD WEISMANN
Roz Chast
2014
Bloomsbury USA
Do you parents make you crazy? You are not alone. After you
escape your childhood home, the pressure abates for a while, but unless they
are victims of a tragic accident or you are successfully estranged from them .
. . you will have to deal with their end-of-life issues. Someday. Sooner than
later. It will not be pretty.
Enter Roz Chast, long-time cartoonist for the New Yorker
magazine, whose neurotic musings have long reassured me that I am not alone.
Once again, she steps up to provide much-needed laughter and recognition of the
difficulties of caring for aged parents, and dealing with their passing, in the
sad-but-funny-but-true “Can’t we talk about something more PLEASANT?”
Let's get this straight -- this is not a cute, whimsical, perky little story. Her exquisitely honest account of the ends of her parents’
lives and the repercussions thereof seemingly makes for a God-that’s-not-funny book. With a deft mingling of narrative, graphic panelwork, and archival
photographs, Chast is able to transmit the complexity of the experience into
graspable, human terms, and those terms can be instantly appreciated by any
reader who has gone through a similar experience.
Parents – what can we do with them? The reversal of roles,
in which the children become caretakers, is at best awkward and at worst extremely
painful, wrought with anger and shame. The figures that stood over us, shaped
us, approved of us or not, are now in our shoes and we in theirs. As their
bodies decay and their minds unravel, we are forced to take charge, making
decisions, closing doors and opening doors, smoothing the path to death. With them fighting, fighting, fighting, fighting, fighting every proposal every step of the way.
What a riot? The humor in Chast’s new book comes from the
relief of simple empathy. She outlines her background and childhood, provides sketches
(literally and figuratively) of her parents – neurotic, apartment-dwelling New
Yorkers, her mother domineering and violently emotional, her father sweet but
passive. Starting with the registering of accumulating piles around their home,
and untended layers of grime, Chast realizes that intervention needs to take
place.
Parental taboos on discussing death, the afterlife, money,
plans must be overcome. Her father’s senile dementia, coupled with her mother’s
increasing bouts of disability, begin to eat up Chast’s time, thoughts, and
resources. Her suppressed resentment is palpable on every page, as she deals
with the increasingly catastrophic consequences of their denial of inescapable reality.
Along the way, she gives us unflinching looks at such things
as the detritus left in her parents’ place (eight pages of color photographs!), dealing with mounds of incomprehensible paperwork, trying to guess what level of care can eat up how much money for what length of time, and asides regarding “assisted-living” facilities (“As Places went, it wasn’t
bad. It didn’t make you want to kill yourself”). Chast is very up-front about
her conflict between loveing her parents and resenting them, between revealing all and feeling that she is exploiting her
situation for material. But her catharsis is real, and the reader is better for
it.
There are no Hollywood ending in the ordinary lives of those
we love. There is no magical closure.
“. . . I cried. The bellowing quality of
the sobbing and the depth of the sadness I felt surprised me. I was angry, too.
Why hadn’t she tried harder to know me? But I knew: if there had ever been a
time in my relationship with my mother for us to get to know one another – and that’s
a very big ‘if’ – that time had long since passed.”
The most horrible thing I could think would be to summarize
by declaring chirpily that this is a book everyone will love. No, you won’t.
This is NOT a book you should rush out and buy copies of for all your friends and
relatives, as though it were some kind of magic palliative for the grief,
confusion, anger, and sorrow everyone must wade through to get to The End. But
-- if you have dealt with this subject in any way shape of form, you will find
it a great comfort. And maybe it will help you deal. And that’s not an
inconsiderable achievement.
