Great new memoir...
When people talk about extending the human lifespan to 120 it bothers Roz Chast. "That upsets me for a lot of reasons," she tells NPR's Melissa Block. "I feel like these are people who don't really know anybody over 95." The reality of old age, she says, is that "people are not in good shape, and everything is falling apart."
Chast should know. The longtime New Yorker cartoonist is an only child and became the sole caretaker for her parents, George and Elizabeth Chast, when they reached old age. In her new, illustrated memoir — Can't We Talk About Something More Pleasant? — Chast mixes the humor with the heartache. It's about the last years of her parents' lives and her relationship with them as their child and conflicted caretaker.
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They never had what's known these days as "The Talk" — an acknowledgement that their deaths were inevitable. As a result, Chast says, everyone was in denial and actively avoided the subject, even as it was staring them squarely in the face.
Chast's parents — who were both born in 1912 — lived independently in Brooklyn up until their early 90s. Things started to go downhill in 2005 when her mother fell off a step stool at age 93. "She was in bed for a few days, and it was clear that what was going on was more than the fall off the ladder," Chast recalls. "That was the beginning of their sort of slide into the next part of old age — you know, the last chapters."
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With her mother in the hospital after the fall, it quickly became clear that her father's dementia was worse than Chast had realized. "As long as he was in their familiar apartment with my mother sort of steering the ship, things were holding their own," she says. But when he came to live with her family in Connecticut, "I realized he was more far gone than I'd known."
Even in a time of family crisis, Chast found moments of humor. She recounts one shopping trip with her father when she held up a red sweater for his consideration. "I can't wear that!" he told her. "Why not?" she asked. "It's RED," he answered. "Communism."