Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant by Roz Chast– 228 pages
Book Blurb:
In her first memoir, Roz Chast brings her signature wit to the topic of aging parents. Spanning the last several years of their lives and told through four-color cartoons, family photos, and documents, and a narrative as rife with laughs as it is with tears, Chast’s memoir is both comfort and comic relief for anyone experiencing the life-altering loss of elderly parents. When it came to her elderly mother and father, Roz held to the practices of denial, avoidance, and distraction. But when Elizabeth Chast climbed a ladder to locate an old souvenir from the “crazy closet”–with predictable results–the tools that had served Roz well through her parents’ seventies, eighties, and into their early nineties could no longer be deployed.
My Review: 4 stars
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Thanks to my followers for sharing this title with me. Roz Chast has nailed the emotions of the care-taking, sandwich generation. She shares her experiences and coping mechanisms as she watches, partakes, avoids, advocates and cries during her parents’ decline.
Yes, Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant is a sad book, yet Chast uses her cartoon illustrations to lighten the experience, which ultimately helps readers going through this same ordeal. Sadly, I have many friends who share very non-descript stories about their parents’ dementia. This book, on the other hand, is quite descriptive in the bizarre anecdotes that are shared by her parents. This book allowed me to finally grasp the magnitude of this emotional burden that my friends are dealing with.
Additionally, for those readers not quite at that stage in life, it’s a beautiful guide in which we can learn how to prepare. It propels us to ask our loved ones the difficult questions about overall aging plans as well as the financial strategies in place, before they are too sick to answer. And of course, it encourages us to have our parents clean out their junk drawers, go through the unopened boxes since their last move and go through their desks and closets.
Overall, this was equally insightful and slightly depressing. I’m quite glad I read this book.
Quotes I liked:
Meanwhile, my father lived with us. Any Florence Nightingale- type visions I ever had of myself- an unselfish, patient, sweet, caring child who happily tended to her parents in their old age- were destroyed within an hour or so.”
-“I was aggravated that they hadn’t dealt with their accumulations, back when they had the ability to do so. That instead, whey decided to leave, they simply packed a couple of little bags and walked out, leaving me the task of cleaning out their apartment.”
-“Is it possible there was something amazing hiding in the wreckage? Yes. Do I wish I had had unlimited time to comb through everything? Kind of. But where would I have put all the stuff? We have too much stuff as it is.
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