Picturing dementia

Some 25 years ago my parents and one of their best friends, Gertrude, started showing signs of dementia. As their conditions worsened, Gertrude’s daughter Ann and I began trading morbid geriatric jokes. Laughing helped us face the daily struggles of caregiving: it felt so much better than crying.

In 2014, New Yorker cartoonist Roz Chast published a graphic memoir about her aging parents that would have been perfect for Ann and me. Can’t We Talk about Something More Pleasant? (which will be released in paperback this Septem­ber) is often improbably funny. Its comic-strip presentation is poignantly true to life: frazzled caregivers will recognize themselves on every page, and they may also see aspects of their parents in Chast’s clueless father and ferocious mother. Chast’s drawings let us cry, and then they make us laugh—sometimes simultaneously.

Her parents, she discovers, are losing their balance and their memory. They fall, drive dangerously, eat poorly, and have anxiety attacks. They end up in the hospital. They can no longer cope. Chast to the rescue! She manages their finances and legal documents. She moves them to a safe place near her home and cleans out the apartment they’ve lived (and hoarded) in for decades. She helps her father transition from assisted living to hospital to nursing home to hospice. She stands by her mother as she becomes incontinent, anorexic, and delusional.Chast’s caregiving begins the day she notices grime covering everything in her parents’ apartment—“not ordinary dust, or dirt, or a greasy stovetop that hasn’t been cleaned in a week or two,” but “a coating that happens when people haven’t cleaned in a really long time.” The grime shocks Chast into recognizing that something is seriously wrong: “I could see that they were slowly leaving the sphere of TV commercial old age (spry! totally independent! just like a normal adult, but with silver hair!!!) and moving into the part of old age that was scarier, harder to talk about, and not a part of this culture. . . . SOMETHING WAS COMING DOWN THE PIKE.”  She begins making regular visits from her Connecticut home to their Brooklyn apartment.