The New Yorker magazine cartoonist Roz Chast’s Can’t we talk about something more PLEASANT? evoked a range of emotions as I absorbed her insightful, witty – but essentially sad – chronicle of her parents’ final years.

What Chast reveals is more than a description of her tortured web of (mostly negative) feelings for her mother; her sympathy for her dad; and more than a step-by-step dissection of her parents’ slide from independence…to assisted living…to nursing care…to hospice. In essence, she details her parents’ decline from a unique ‘only-child’ perspective.

Chast’s intensely graphic depiction of her parents’ agonizingly slow, and at times emotionally draining, transition is both touching and exasperating. [Read more…]