DOWNTOWN — Old age does not look remotely like a Cialis commercial.
"They're on another planet," New Yorker cartoonist Roz Chast said of the perpetually lusty seniors featured in E.D. ads.
What does romance really look like between a long-married couple?
How about simply not coming at each other with butcher's knives, she said. Or maybe just enjoying the same TV show — never mind holding hands across bathtubs.
Chast, 60, in town recently to speak at the Chicago Institute for Psychoanalysis annual benefit, knows whereof she speaks.
New Yorker cartoonist Roz Chast, at the Standard Club of Chicago, was in town to speak at the Chicago Institute for Psychoanalysis. [DNAinfo/Patty Wetli]
Her graphic memoir, the 2014 National Book Award-finalist "Can't We Talk About Something More Pleasant?" recounts Chast's experiences caring for her elderly parents when both were in their 90s. Her father George died in 2007, her mother Elizabeth in 2009.
As much as "Can't We Talk ..." is a way for Chast, an only child, to keep the memory of her parents alive, it also aims to pull back the curtain on the indignities of old age, and to question why a person's last months, weeks or days have to be so miserable.
Patty Wetli says Chast drew from experiences with her parents:
The body "falls apart in really bad ways," Chast said, referring in part to a scene in which she describes the sudden onset of her mother's incontinence, one of her book's most heartbreaking scenes.
"My mother was so humiliated," she said. "I just realized, 'This is what it is.'"
As a person's physical state deteriorates, why not let the mind take over and travel in a way the body never could, Chast wondered.
In "Can't We Talk ..." she writes: "I wish that, at the end of life, when things were truly 'done,' there was something to look forward to. Something more pleasure-oriented. Perhaps opium, or heroin. So you become addicted. So what?"
Why can't there be "something more pleasure-oriented" at the end of life? Chast wondered. [DNAinfo/Patty Wetli; photo of "Can't We Talk About Something More Pleasant"]
"I'm not saying everybody over 80 should be given LSD," Chast clarified, but if, say, psychedelics were administered instead of medical treatment after medical treatment, perhaps people would be a little more excited about reaching the end stages of life.
"I don't know how I'm going to feel when I'm that age, I do hope there are more options," she said.
"I would think maybe there's room for more mental and spiritual explorations when you get to a certain age," Chast said.
In "Can't We Talk ...," Chast skewers the media's depiction of the elderly — "Spry! Totally independent!! Just like a normal adult but with silver hair!!!" — compared against the reality of her parents' frailty.
"I cannot bear it when people talk about extending life to 120," she said. "These are people who are stupid or really, really naive."
There's a disconnect, Chast said, between the media's representation of old age and the reality. [DNAinfo/Patty Wetli; photo of "Can't We Talk About Something More Pleasant"]
"People want to think it's about craft circles and walking clubs," she said, and to a certain extent, the youth of old age is.
Chast's parents stayed in their Brooklyn home until they were unable to care for themselves, with her father taking regular jaunts to the nearby subway station and her mom participating in poetry and piano groups.
"Everything is closer," she said of city living. "You have neighbors, you're less isolated. The urban environment is wonderful ... until it's not."
What happens after "until it's not" — when Chast's parents entered "The Place," her code name for their assisted living facility — forms the crux of her memoir, the details of which Chast refused to water down even if in our youth-obsessed culture that meant her book might only sell 12 copies.
"Cultures have different ways of approaching the end of life," she said. "We just don't want to go there."
But go there she did, and though her gaze in classic Chast fashion is by turns acerbic, poignant and laugh-out-loud funny, it's also unblinking.
Chast managed to keep her sense of humor even in the darkest of moments. [DNAinfo/Patty Wetli; photo of "Can't We Talk About Something More Pleasant"]
The "hundreds and hundreds of letters" she's received in response to "Can't We Talk..." suggest that Chast's experiences — sorting through her parents' long hoarded possessions, the anxiety of mounting medical and nursing home bills, the guilt of leaving the "dirty work" to hired help — have touched a chord with readers.
Chast didn't shy away from the constant financial worries she experienced while caring for her elderly parents. [DNAinfo/Patty Wetli; photo of "Can't We Talk About Something More Pleasant"]
Though Chast described the narrative as deeply personal and "close to the bone," she discovered that her story of coping with her parents' aging and death was "not unique to a Jewish family from Brooklyn."
"There's no perfect way," she said. "You do the best you can."
Her own children, a grown son and daughter, can thank her for providing them with a road map, or minimally bracing them for what to expect in 30 years.
"I think they're hoping we won't leave a giant pile of crap for them," Chast said.
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