Sarah Cavanaugh: Hi everyone, it's Sarah. Before we get to my conversation with Roz Chast, I want to share some exciting news. My first book, "Peaceful Exit: A Guide to Reimagining Your Final Chapter," will be published on October 20th. It's about the choices we have around how we live, how we care for one another, and how we want to approach the end of our lives. I hope you'll get a copy on October 20th for yourself, for someone you love, for a friend who might be thinking about these same questions. Okay, that's enough from me. Here's the episode.

[00:00:34] Roz Chast:You know, maybe I was deluding myself in this but I thought, if I'm gonna write a book like this, I'm gonna be honest about it. I'm gonna be as candid as I can. Because they were really remarkable people. It was hard at the end, but I don't think I would want to write about it in any other way.

Sarah Cavanaugh: Welcome to Peaceful Exit, the podcast where we talk to creatives about death, dying, grief, and also life. I'm Sarah Cavanaugh, and my guest today is cartoonist Roz Chast. She's best known for her work in The New Yorker, and for her 2014 graphic memoir, "Can't We Talk About Something More Pleasant?" In this interview, Roz talks about the diverse challenges of caring for aging parents, the complicated grief of never quite connecting with her mother, and why humor can help us express what's often hardest to say. We also discuss her new book, "The Two Saddest Kitchens," about the existential dread of having so much stuff. I've been wanting to talk to Roz for a long time, and she was definitely worth the wait.

[00:01:56] Sarah Cavanaugh: I am thrilled to meet you. I have been thinking about this conversation for about three years, believe it or not. I’ve followed your work since the early '80s and when you came out with the book, "Can't We Talk About Something More Pleasant?," I was so excited about it. It's an honor to meet you, and welcome to Peaceful Exit.

[00:02:15] Roz Chast:Great to be here

[00:02:17] Sarah Cavanaugh: I'm super curious, are your parents still in your closet?

[00:02:21] Roz Chast:No, no. I wrote an epilogue, about something that happened a few years after the book came out. I got an email from somebody, a stranger, who said that she was curious about, uh, one thing in the book. She was curious about where my parents' first child was buried. And there is apparently a site called Find A Grave, and she looked up online “Chast baby," and she found that their baby was buried at a Jewish cemetery. It's on the border of Brooklyn and Queens, Mount Lebanon Cemetery. I said, "Whoa, that's kinda interesting." So I called the cemeterian, as it turns out this person is called, and I said, "I wrote this book about my parents and somebody wrote me." And, and he said not only was my sister buried there but also my grandparents, and I could come out there, which I did with my parents' ashes. Even though cremation is not a typical thing in Jewish tradition, he said that there were lots of discussions in the Jewish cemetery business and he made a little joke, he said, "It's a hot topic. Ha ha ha." Anyway, I went out there but the crazy thing that happened was that he had found the records and everything like that, and he said, "I think I found the perfect place for your parents' ashes.” And there's this niche wall that overlooks where their first baby was buried, and there's only one, it's high up on the wall, there's only one niche left in that wall and the niche was J2, the number J2, and my parents' apartment where they lived for 50 years where I grew up was 2J. So, you know, it was just this crazy sort of coincidence. I mean, the whole thing was so nuts. I wrote it up for The New Yorker, which they published, and that's what wound up being the epilogue.

[00:04:26] Sarah Cavanaugh: That's so fantastic. I had a, a man named Carl in my closet for a long, long time, so I could relate to the ashes in the closet.

[00:04:34] Roz Chast:Yes. Was this Carl someone you were close to, I hope? Or just some random Carl?

[00:04:41] Sarah Cavanaugh: So his name was Carl Dellaccio, and he was married to a very dear friend of mine who, I ended up taking care of her in her 90s until she died at 97. And she had made me promise that I would commingle their ashes when she died. And so I had to have them for a while in the closet, which I actually flew them up from Arizona in my carry-on, but TSA doesn't know kinda how to handle a box of ashes in your carry-on 'cause the, the X-ray doesn't see through it. So it was quite an adventure. But anyway, Carl ended up in my closet for several years.

[00:05:18] Roz Chast:Okay. Yeah, it's a weird thing. It's a weird thing.

[00:05:22] Sarah Cavanaugh: So you're one of the best-known modern cartoonists around. Growing up, did you ever think this would be your profession?

[00:05:32] Roz Chast:I never thought about anything other than drawing. You know, I hoped that somehow I would make a living, I had no idea how. I didn't know anything. My parents were, you know, they were teachers. They were in that system. But I never thought about doing anything for a living except drawing. And when I was around maybe 11 or 12, I started thinking about cartoons and cartooning and, you know, I always loved it. I loved Mad Magazine.I loved things that made me laugh, you know?

[00:06:02] Sarah Cavanaugh: I'm wondering about how people receive information, and I think humor goes straight to the heart.

[00:06:08] Roz Chast:Well, I think that you can say some things with humor that might be very hard to say otherwise. Things that are sort of annoying can also be sort of funny, like the fights that you have with your partner or something. For a long time, I think this is an ongoing thing, we had this, like, silent fight — I think this was something that ran in The New Yorkera few months ago — where my husband believes that, like, you have to move the faucet away from the drain. I don't believe in this philosophy, and also I hate the way it doesn't line up with the drain just visually. So it's like this silent fight. He moves it away, and I move it, and he moves it. And then sometimes I get the whole explanation of why the water shouldn't go down the drain, and I go, "Uh-huh, uh-huh." Eventually it moves back. And this is just when you live with another person, this is just every day there's this kind of thing. And it's, you know, genuinely annoying and it's also genuinely funny. Humor is very complex. It can be something very silly like slapstick, but it can also be something where you're really angry, but even so it's funny.

[00:07:24] Sarah Cavanaugh: You can hold both, the funny and the, you know —

[00:07:26] Roz Chast:Yeah, you can have both. Yeah, I'm really mad about this. I hate it, and it's very aggravating, but also it's kind of hilarious.

[00:07:34] Sarah Cavanaugh: Well, let's talk about your book. In 2014, you published "Can't We Talk About Something More Pleasant?" And it chronicled the decline and eventual deaths of your parents just two years apart from each other. When did it occur to you to turn this experience into a graphic book? I know you were drawing your mother as she lay dying, but when did it kind of form into this idea of a book?

[00:08:01] Roz Chast:You know, it's weird. I, I just don't exactly remember. I think it was probably somewhere in the back of my mind from the beginning because what's going on in my life is generally a part of what I draw about and always has been. You know, there's — the boundary between my life and what I'm working on is somewhat porous. There were a lot of cartoons in the book that I had submitted in the 10, 15 years before my parents were in that state that I did because, like what we were talking about, about situations that are annoying but also kind of funny. But when I was doing the book about my parents, I wanted to give what I was talking about some context. My parents didn't go from, you know, being my parents when I was 10 and then suddenly it's 45, 50 years later and I'm dealing with this. It's like they were who they were always, and I was always drawing about them, and I still do draw about them. I didn't really have like a, "Well, now I'm gonna make it a book." It's like this sort of—

[00:09:14] Sarah Cavanaugh: Yeah. This is part of the, part of your process.

[00:09:19] Roz Chast:You know, because my parents were a lot older than other people's parents, I felt like when I was going through it I didn't know other people who were going through this. I was sort of profoundly ignorant of all of this kind of stuff, what being really old was. I just didn't know.

[00:09:37] Sarah Cavanaugh: After they were gone, did drawing help you process your grief? Because even though the relationships are complicated, there's always something that follows

[00:09:47] Roz Chast:I don't know. I mean, it was such a complicated feeling when they died. There was grief, there was relief, there was sadness. But there wasn't sadness so much, especially with my mother, it wasn't sadness that she died, it was sadness that we never really got to connect. And that is just, that's still a sadness. That's still part of my life.

[00:10:14] Sarah Cavanaugh: It's heartbreak.

[00:10:17] Roz Chast:Yeah, it is. You know, I think there's a lot of people that have that. You watch TV or movies and there's often some sort of, something happens on the deathbed or at the end of life and some kind of connection that's made, and it changes everything, and it changes your feeling. And not everybody has that.

[00:10:36] Sarah Cavanaugh: I love your comics for their universal truths. I know that people have the same kind of experience that you did, and to be able to share that and let people let some air out of the tires and laugh a little.

[00:10:48] Roz Chast:Yeah. It's funny, I had a cartoonist friend say that's what cartoons often do too. They let a little air out of the tire, so.

[00:10:57] Sarah Cavanaugh: So you open the book by sharing the story of your parents losing a baby before you were born and she was just one day old, and that's similar to my story. My brother died at three weeks. My parents lost a child named Matthew before I was born, and it's clear from your book that your mom did not want to talk about death. So I'm curious, how do you think their unspoken grief over this impacted them and impacted you?

[00:11:26] Roz Chast:A lot of times I think of it like if you get a kid a puppy, and this kid loves the puppy more than anything in the entire universe, just like adores this puppy. And a few days after they get the puppy, the puppy runs into the road and gets killed. And the parents get the kid another puppy, and the kid no longer feels that open heart towards the puppy because they know how much it hurts when they lost the puppy, and so they're guarded. The older I got when I had my own children, I started to have a little insight. And, uh, this is conjecture. I don't know, 'cause my parents wouldn't talk about it. They would not talk about it. But I think that when they lost that baby, it was so scary for them because not only did the baby die, but my mother almost died. I think that they were terrified of losing me. So yeah, it affected them a lot, I think.

[00:12:31] Sarah Cavanaugh: I wonder if that's part of your mom's terror is how she treated you.

[00:12:36] Roz Chast:I think so. I think it was, you know, I was the second puppy.

[00:12:40] Sarah Cavanaugh: You don't shy away from the totally unglamorous, unfunny parts of aging and of caring for aging parents. And I was talking to a friend yesterday about the cycle of diapers to diapers. Did you know you needed to be so candid for this book to work?

[00:12:57] Roz Chast:You know, maybe I was deluding myself in this, but I thought, like, if I'm gonna write a book like this, I'm gonna be honest about it. I'm gonna be as candid as I can, because they were really remarkable people. It was hard at the end, but I don't think I would want to write about it in any other way.

[00:13:18] Sarah Cavanaugh: Were there parts of watching your parents age and eventually die that you kept off the page? Was anything too hard to write about?

[00:13:26] Roz Chast:I didn't write about things that took away from the story, that distracted from it.

[00:13:34] Sarah Cavanaugh: I really appreciated the scene where your mom has an accident everywhere. She loses control of her bowels, 'cause I think that we have so much trouble talking about the body and what happens when we age, things that you don't expect.

[00:13:48] Roz Chast:Things that she didn't expect, that I didn't expect. It was terrible. But it's also very ... it's just the body. It was just the body failing, you know?

[00:14:00] Sarah Cavanaugh: Your book came out more than a decade ago. Have any of your feelings about your parents, about caretaking or grief changed since then? Or do you look back and wish you'd done something in another way?

[00:14:12] Roz Chast:I wish I had been more patient, especially with my father. Mainly that. I don't know if I miss them exactly, but I miss things about them. I think my father was a really nice guy. I think about him a lot. I think he really did love me in a way that my mother — I don't know why, she just did not have that softness in her, you know?

[00:14:38] Sarah Cavanaugh: I wonder if it was the fear of losing you. It's almost like she couldn't get close to you.

[00:14:43] Roz Chast:I mean, sometimes I feel sad because I'm very close to my kids and I don't take it for granted. I don't understand why — she was a very smart woman, and I don't know why she believed that somehow when she was mean that everything was gonna be hunky dory when I was an adult, that I would forget. You know, she would say things like, "Well, when you have your own kids," and na, na, na. And I never — it's not like I never lost my temper or I never did wrong things, 'cause I did. But, you know, afterwards I would, you know, think about it, and I, I was aware of how my relationship with them when they were younger— it all was connected, that it wasn't like, childhood wasn't some sort of, you know, thing where then this, like, big brick wall came down and that was that.

Sarah Cavanaugh: I love in your book how you use photographs of their place, the grime, the dust, the newspapers, uh, the things that accumulate when older people stop cleaning or they're not able to clean anymore. Talk about the challenges of trying to care for people who don't wanna be cared for.

[00:16:14] Roz Chast: It's really ... it's hard because in many cases you don't wanna be caring for them anyway, but you know that it's kind of what you need to be doing. And when they make it even harder and when they fight you on it and they make it unpleasant, like really unpleasant, part of you just wants to say, "Fine, you know? Do it yourself." So yeah, it's incredibly hard. I worried especially, you know, in that year or so before I got them out of their apartment and into an assisted living place, it was really scary. Any time the phone rang I would be, like, terrified. And I don't have brothers and sisters, so it's very hard to sort of balance all of these things and, uh, to feel like people aren't gonna, like, fall down the building stairs or start wandering around in the building. And especially with my father because he had more dementia than I knew. He was masking it when he was with my mother, or she masked it, whatever. It's hard. I mean, I'm glad that these places, these assisted living places, exist but you know, they're not ideal and they cost everything, you know, financially. I think I really wanted to talk about that in the book also because it was so appalling. In my heart I felt, like, disgusting about it. But the fact that I was, like, disgusted with myself for feeling so angry about it didn't make me less angry. It just, it was like, now I'm angry and disgusted. I thought that there was some sort of help. I very naively thought things, like my parents' insurance will somehow help. I thought that when they moved to Connecticut, the insurance they had in New York would transfer to Connecticut. Did not. I was so naive about all of it. My parents had a savings. All of it went really fast. I mean, in a way it was like a black comedy because these were people who, like, they would come up to visit me and my father would be saying, "Well, how much do they charge for a box of Fig Newtons around you?," you know? Which is very different from $15,000 base every month flying out the window. And that is not intensive care. That is just because now they have a place to live, you know, with people that are on staff who can respond to them if one of them falls or something like that. If you're middle class in this country, the government doesn't really give a shit. They really don't. There's no safety net

Sarah Cavanaugh: Yeah, if you have any prolonged aging process and illness and …

[00:18:53] Roz Chast:Yeah. I mean, that was why I included it. You know, not only to show to everybody that I'm a jerk who worries about like, "Oh my God, there's gonna be nothing left for me," but this is the country we live in. This is it. It makes me so mad. It's like, are you crazy?

Sarah Cavanaugh: In the book you call assisted living facilities “Places” with a capital "P," which I really appreciate. Talk about why you chose the word "Place."

[00:19:24] Roz Chast:It's a sort of euphemism with a little bit of an edge. It's like, what else do we do? We, we’re gonna put you in a place. We were gonna put you in a place. It's a nice place. It's a place for old, old people

[00:19:42] Sarah Cavanaugh: If you were to design one today, what kind of place would you want to live in?

[00:19:48] Roz Chast:I would like to live in a place that had, of course, medical staff, all that, but also movies and a really good library and crafts, crafts, crafts. Crafts all the ding-dang day. And possibly a bar. And also maybe like a place — what do they have those places in Amsterdam where people can, I'm past my smoking years 'cause it makes me cough, but I like gummies, And I'm hoping that I will enjoy them, you know, when I'm shuffling off to Buffalo. That would be it. Crafts, library, movies, medical staff, gummies. I could do that.

Sarah Cavanaugh: So you describe throughout the book your mother's extremely strong personality, her resistance to doctors and hospitals and even talking about the end of her life. Based on your experience, do you have advice for how to manage aging parents with difficult dispositions?

[00:21:07] Roz Chast: Writing stuff down always helps me. If you are lucky to have friends that you can write an email to, that helped me, to just say, "You won't believe what happened today. You won't believe this conversation I had." Writing about something and drawing about it, as you said before, it lets a little air out of the tires. It gives me a feeling a little bit more of control and I can shape it how I want it. I can tell the story how I want it.

[00:21:19] Sarah Cavanaugh: But how did you cope with the guilt that you experienced during this time? 'Cause you were their caretaker, you're their only child and you couldn't be there 24/7. You had your own family out of state.

[00:21:33] Roz Chast:It was bad. I tried to call them as much as I could, um, I went out there to see them a lot. I would bring food to them, but there was always that sense that, you know, "Why am I not doing more?" Am I a bad daughter? I don't know. I don't know if there's a way of gettingpast it, you know

[00:21:53] Sarah Cavanaugh: Yeah. Forgiving yourself, really.

[00:21:56] Roz Chast:Yeah. I don't know. I mean, I was able to function enough that even if I felt awful, somehow just day by day it was okay,

[00:22:09] Sarah Cavanaugh: Let's talk for a minute about your next book coming out, which is "The Two Saddest Kitchens."

[00:22:14] Roz Chast:Yes

[00:22:15] Sarah Cavanaugh: So you co-authored this book, uh, and co-cartooned it. Is that a word? Uh …

[00:22:22] Roz Chast:It is now.

[00:22:23] Sarah Cavanaugh: How did you two come up with this idea?

[00:22:26] Roz Chast:Jason is a wonderful fellow New Yorker cartoonist, and he had done a book a few years ago, a graphic memoir called "Everything is an Emergency." And it was about his OCD, it was wonderful, and we became friends. Anyway, we were meeting for coffee and we started talking about, just randomly, I don't even know why, we were talking about our kitchens and the problems we had with our kitchens. Like, you know, various appliances and the sort of half-dead refrigerator, and, uh, just the drawer that gets stuck. And one of my favorite cartoons in that book is his, and it's about the stuck drawer, and he's just looking at it and he says, "Well, I guess it's gonna be like that forever." And I mean, that just encapsulated how I feel about so many things, you know. It's a book about kitchens, about cooking, about food, about making food for other people, about feeding oneself, about, like, why do we have so many different teas? With the frightening food processor, which I've never owned one. I just can't even imagine. I'd be afraid to clean it, you know? Junk drawers, all, all of that stuff. And so we just started having these conversations about this. At some point I said to him, "You know, I think we could do a book."

[00:24:13] Sarah Cavanaugh: What is it about kitchens but also about the stuff in our homes more broadly that provokes this sort of existential dread? And it relates back to your parents' apartment. You took a picture of their blender that was actually from the 1950s, and I was thinking about that.

Roz Chast: Our stuff. There's a lot of, for me, dread about it in a way. Like, I look at my stuff right now and I think, "Oh my God, we just have too much." We've lived in this house now for 36 years, and we have accumulated way, way too much stuff. We have so many books. We have my husband's f-ing DVD collection. I wanna, like, throw them in the trash, but then it's like, they'll just go to like, some trash heap and never decompose.I don't know, it just gives me like a creepy feeling. Yeah. But kitchens have their own problems, you know? Because they're supposed to be so, I don't know, warm and sort of inviting, and it's just very, uh, you know, the whole thing is just very anxiety-provoking.

[00:24:54] Sarah Cavanaugh: Well, you express in the book a constant pressure to care intensely about everything. What you cook, what you eat, your work, your kids, your marriage, your stuff. Should we care a little bit less?

[00:25:06] Roz Chast:I don't know about "should," but I find that I do. Maybe I should care more. It's just really hard. Sometimes I see pictures of these aspirational dinner parties. I don't think I would like that. I don't think I'd like to go to one. To know that somebody had sort of worked that hard to, like, make it so perfect. I don't think that would please me.

[00:25:34] Sarah Cavanaugh: At the very end of the book, there's a cartoon I love of a tombstone engraved with the sentence, "I can't believe I ate all that kale for nothing."

[00:25:43] Roz Chast:Well, eh, it's kind of for everything. Yeah.

[00:25:47] Sarah Cavanaugh: Why did you end the book with that particular image and sentiment?

[00:25:52] Roz Chast:I guess it's just kind of the way it is with everything. It's eventually we do sort of, um, shuffle off to Buffalo, I guess, as they say. I don't know. I have a kid who's a therapist, and we were talking recently about something called adaptive denial, how it just relates to that sort of existential thing of, knowing from the time you were about five what's gonna come. If you're lucky, if you don't, you know, a piano doesn't fall on your head the next day.You are going to reach a certain peak, and then it's gonna go downhill, and it's gonna go downer hills than, you know, you even thought, and then you're gonna die. You have to sort of, uh, have, I guess, some amount of adaptive denial, to just sort of say, "Well, you know, we're gonna make the best of it, and, you know, we're gonna go out to our favorite Mexican restaurant tonight, and I'm gonna have a glass of wine, and, um, and then we're gonna watch, you know, this show, and …”

[00:26:50] Sarah Cavanaugh: Make the best of it

[00:26:52] Roz Chast:So yeah, make the best of it.

[00:26:54] Sarah Cavanaugh: What does a peaceful exit mean to you?

[00:26:57] Roz Chast:I think about my dad, you know? I mean, his exit, I think it was a good one. He was 95. He told my mother that he wanted to pack it in, and she was very upset about that. But his hip had broken, and he had dementia, and he was in bed, and he just was not doing well. I think he knew. And I visited him all the time in those last weeks 'cause, you know, they were in the “Place” by then. I could tell he was going, he was dying. He seemed at peace with it, and he talked about his life, like how lucky he was to have discovered his passion for French, and to have become a French teacher. And his friends that he had met, and meeting my mother. Oh my God, he would go on and on about how lucky he was to have met my mother and ... I think he felt like it was okay. I had gotten a call the day before he died that he was having trouble swallowing, and that I should bring some food to the place that was easy to eat, like pudding or … I got him some ice cream sandwiches because he loved his ice cream sandwiches. And he was sitting in the wheelchair, and he had a little bit of the ice cream sandwich, but it was hard for him, so then he wanted to get into bed. And I did not think that was the last time I was, I was gonna see him. And I said goodbye to him, and then I got a call that he was passing, and by the time I got ... I, I was there within, like, five minutes, and he had died, or maybe 10 minutes. And my mother had taken an opportunity to use the toilet. She went to the bathroom. He died while she was in the bathroom for just a few minutes. And the hospice nurse who was with him said that she has seen that so many times, that the person chooses. That seems like a good death to me. To sort of be not terrified. You know, he was on morphine. But to be okay, to have, you know, your people who you love, who care for you around you, and to feel okay about your life. So that, to me, is a peaceful exit.