secondary terry pratchett: choosing to die · primary reading “can’t we talk about something...

Primary reading “Can’t We Talk about Something More Pleasant?”

By Roz Chast, 2014.

Secondary

reading “Terry Pratchett: Choosing to Die” by Charlie Russell,

2011.

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Updated on May 14, 2016

“Can’t We Talk about Something More Pleasant?” 1

https://villasophiasalon.wordpress.com/2013/12/

“Can’t We Talk about Something More Pleasant?”

by Roz Chast

2014

Source: < http://projects.newyorker.com/story/chast-parents/>, 2016/4/26


Roz Chast (1954-)

Source: < https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roz_Chast >, 2016/04/26


Rosalind "Roz" Chast (born November 26, 1954) is an American cartoonist and a staff cartoonist for The

New Yorker. She grew up in the Flatbush section of Brooklyn, the only child of an assistant principal and a

high school teacher who subscribed to The New Yorker. Her earliest cartoons were published in Christopher

Street and The Village Voice. In 1978 The New Yorker accepted one of her cartoons and has since published

more than 800. She also publishes cartoons in Scientific American and the Harvard Business Review.

In recognition of her work, Comics Alliance listed Chast as one of twelve women cartoonists deserving of

lifetime achievement recognition. Chast's subjects often deal with domestic and family life. In a 2006

interview with comedian Steve Martin for The New Yorker Festival, Chast revealed that she enjoys drawing

interior scenes — often involving lamps and accentuated wall paper — to serve as the backdrop for her

comics. Her comics reflect a "conspiracy of inanimate objects", an expression she credits to her mother.

Her first New Yorker cartoon showed a small collection of "Little Things", strangely named, oddly shaped

small objects such as "chent", "spak", and "tiv". Chast's drawing style shuns conventional craft in her figure

drawing, perspective, shading, etc.; this approach is similar to that of several other female cartoonists,

notably Aline Kominsky-Crumb and Lynda Barry. A significant part of the humor in Chast's cartoons appears

in the background and the corners of the frames.

Her New Yorker cartoons began as small black-and-white panels, but increasingly she has been using color

and her work now often appears over several pages. Her first cover for "The New Yorker" was on August 4,

1986, showing a lecturer in a white coat pointing to a family tree of ice cream.

She has written or illustrated more than a dozen books, including Unscientific Americans, Parallel Universes,

Mondo Boxo, Proof of Life on Earth, The Four Elements and The Party After You Left: Collected Cartoons

1995–2003 (Bloomsbury, 2004). In 2006, Theories of Everything: Selected Collected and Health-Inspected

Cartoons, 1978–2006 was published, collecting most of her cartoons from The New Yorker and other

periodicals. One characteristic of her books is that the “author photo” is always a cartoon she draws of,

presumably, herself. The title page is also hand-lettered by Chast, even including the Library of Congress

cataloging information.

Her book Can't We Talk About Something More Pleasant? is a graphic memoir, combining cartoons, text, and

photographs to tell the story of an only child helping her elderly parents navigate the end of their lives.

Source:

<http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/01/books/review/roz-chasts-cant-we-talk-about-something-more-pleasant

.html>, 2016/04/26

“Drawn From Life: Roz Chast’s ‘Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant?’, by Alex Witchel,

in 2014

Here is some well-considered advice from Roz Chast on “How to Prepare for Very, Very Advanced Old

Age”: “Make sure to scrimp and save every penny of your precious earnings. . . . And when your scrimpings

run out:

1) Go into your children’s scrimpings, and/or

2) Play and win the lottery, and/or

3) Apply for a Guggenheim, and/or

4) Start smoking, and/or


5) Take hemlock.”

If you read this list and laughed ruefully, chances are you have parents who are living (if that’s what you

call it) forever, costing a fortune and driving you insane. If not, you are probably young enough to have

parents who are white-water rafting, eating Greek yogurt and driving you insane.

Never fear. Your day will come.

Chast’s cartoons have appeared in The New Yorker since 1978, where her muse, and her beat, is anxiety.

Her signature wavy-lined drawings pulsate with emotion and hope as her words cut straight to hopeless

reality. A classic Chast cartoon shows a joyous man bursting into song, specifically, the refrain of Rodgers

and Hammerstein’s “Oh, What a Beautiful Mornin’. " The caption reads, “In Deep Denial.”

“Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant?” is Chast’s graphic memoir of her parents’ final years:

Her father, George, died at 95; her mother, Elizabeth, at 97. This is a beautiful book, deeply felt, both

scorchingly honest about what it feels like to love and care for a mother who has never loved you back, at

least never the way you had wanted, and achingly wistful about a gentle father who could never break free of

his domineering wife and ride to his daughter’s rescue. It veers between being laugh-out-loud funny and so

devastating I had to take periodic timeouts.

Cartoons, as it happens, are tailor-made for the absurdities of old age, illness and dementia, the odd

dramas and grinding repetition expertly illustrated by copious exclamation points, capital letters and antic

drawings. They also limit the opportunity for navel gazing and self-pity, trapping you in the surreal moments

themselves. The recurring, maniacally angry face of Chast’s mother, which Chast eventually mimics, is one I

have seen in my own mirror all too often.

Chast was an only child raised in Brooklyn — though, technically, that is not quite true. Family lore has it

that when Elizabeth was pregnant the first time, she climbed a step stool to change a light bulb because

George had a phobia about climbing step stools. Afterward, she hemorrhaged, was confined to bed rest and

delivered the baby at 7› months. Her infant girl lived a day before she died. The actual cause, Chast writes,

was probably placenta previa, though the light bulb remained the defining aspect of the story.

Self-recrimination and grief visited Elizabeth for the rest of her life, as they did her husband and daughter.

There’s a certain place in hell-on-earth for children who follow a deceased sibling: Chast was the blank slate

for her father’s crippling fears and for her mother’s rage. Elizabeth worked as an assistant elementary school

principal, and her terrible anger, when directed toward students, was what she herself termed “a blast from

Chast.” Her daughter writes of herself and her father, who taught high school French and Spanish: “The

words we both dreaded were, ‘I’m going to blow my top!’ ”

So it’s no surprise Elizabeth was averse to discussing death. She and George were both 93 before they

agreed to write a will. They met in childhood, growing up two blocks from each other in East Harlem:

“Aside from World War II, work, illness and going to the bathroom, they did everything together. But the

concept of . . .'being happy’ — that was for modern people or movie stars. I.e., degenerates.” Chast’s mother

exclaims: “Elizabeth Taylor! Seven husbands. Oy gevalt.”

“They were a tight little unit,” Chast writes over the drawing of her parents sitting happily on the couch.

“Codependent?” Elizabeth asks. “Of course we’re codependent!” George chimes in, “Thank GOD!!!”

When Chast, pregnant, moved from Manhattan to Connecticut with her husband and 3-year-old son, her

parents were 78 and still lived in the Brooklyn apartment where she grew up. They lasted a good long time in

remarkable shape, though George gradually suffered memory loss. When they reached 93, their woes

multiplied. Chast catalogs all the stations of the aging cross here: shoddy housekeeping, denial, Life Alert,

denial, accidents. Elizabeth climbed a ladder to search for something in her closet, fell backward and hit her


head. When she returned home from the hospital, she fell again, this time while getting dressed. “My father

couldn’t pick her up. . . . He left their apartment to find a neighbor and somehow got lost in the building.”

The cartoon shows him scared and surrounded by doors — 2-A, 4-K, 5-H, all sneering.

Chast moved them into “the Place” in Connecticut near her home, and is honest about how much she

hated this responsibility. She draws herself fantasizing, “Maybe they’ll both die at the same time in their

sleep. . . . And I’ll NEVER have to ‘deal’!”

She deftly captures the social order of “the Place,” which she says was “like the high school cafeteria, but

with old people.” She draws her parents approaching a large, empty table where one woman sits. “These

seats are all reserved,” the woman informs them. The reason, Chast discovers, is that Elizabeth was

considered overbearing and George talked too much. “They were out of practice with socializing. They had

been each other’s only mirrors for too long.”

George dies first. After a bone breaks in his hip, he refuses physical therapy and wastes away. Elizabeth’s

decline was inevitable, although it dragged on for two more brutal years. Mentally acute until then, she tells

her daughter, “I feel like my brains are melting.” Chast was blessed to find Goodie, a Jamaican woman, to be

her mother’s full-time aide. “Even so, I felt guilty not to be ‘doing the dirty work’ myself,” she writes. The

drawing beneath this statement shows Chast haplessly telling Goodie, “Guess I’ll go home now and

DRAW!”

Chast cleans out the Brooklyn apartment, and her photographs of her parents’ belongings are priceless,

including the “museum of old Schick shavers.” Cheapness is fear’s most symbiotic partner, forging a

paralysis that can last a lifetime — because buying, or doing, anything new is just too expensive, financially

and emotionally. If you didn’t grow up with it, don’t try to understand it. You never will.

After Elizabeth died, Chast writes, “I was alone with my mother’s body for a while. I drew her. I didn’t

know what else to do.”

I was moved by that. And by Chast’s writing in her epilogue, “I’m still working things out with my

mother.” I recalled Elizabeth’s lifelong criticism of George, how he walked around “with his feelers out,” too

often worried about the things he said and how people responded. His daughter has been lucky enough to

make her own feelers her life’s work. No one has perfect parents and no one can write a perfect book about

her relationship to them. But Chast has come close.

Pre-reading discussion:

1. What comes to your mind when thinking about death? Why?

2. Why are you afraid / not afraid about death?

3. Is death a difficult issue to bring upon the table? Why are some people reluctant to talk about death?

4. Do you think it is necessary to talk about death? Why or why not? Or for whom it is necessary?

5. Have you ever discussed the issue of death with anyone before?

Questions for the reading:

6. Why does the author entitle her book “Can’t we talk about something more pleasant?”


7. On p. 4, how did “grime” reveal the problem in the house?

8. On p. 6, what are the “trust issues” that the author implies?

9. On p. 9, what are the differences between the real situation at “the end” and the one that the author used

to imagine?

10. On p. 10, why was the author so surprises when she saw her mother fully dressed and eating a tuna

sandwich?

11. On p. 11, what are the author’s inner struggles after the first visit of her mother’s around-the-clock

care?

Post-reading discussion:

12. Did this comic affect your thoughts or understanding of death? If so, what has been changed?

13. Evaluate how getting old affects a person in different levels.

14. Economist, Claire Huang pointed out that “Taiwan is set to surpass Japan as Asia's fastest aging nation this decade.” Why is the fact that Taiwan is

becoming the oldest country in Asia a social problem?

15. How will you face your own death? What kind of life style do you expect while entering your last

days?

“Terry Pratchett—Choosing To Die” directed by Charlie Russell

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terry_Pratchett:_Choosing_to_Die

Source: < http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xnu340_terry-pratchett-choosing-to-die_shortfilmsml>,

2016/5/4

Terry Pratchett (1968-2015)

Source: < https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terry_Pratchett>, 2016/5/4

Sir Terence David John "Terry" Pratchett, OBE (28 April 1948 – 12 March 2015) was an English author of

fantasy novels, especially comical works. He is best known for his Discworld series of 41 novels. Pratchett's

first novel, The Carpet People, was published in 1971; after the first Discworld novel, The Colour of Magic,

was published in 1983, he wrote two books a year on average. His 2011 Discworld novel Snuff was at the

time of its release the third-fastest-selling hardback adult-readership novel since records began in the UK,

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terry_Pratchett:_Choosing_to_Die


selling 55,000 copies in the first three days. His final Discworld novel, The Shepherd's Crown, was published

in August 2015, five months after his death.

Pratchett, with more than 85 million books sold worldwide in 37 languages, was the UK's best-selling author

of the 1990s. He was appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in 1998 and was knighted

for services to literature in the 2009 New Year Honours. In 2001 he won the annual Carnegie Medal for The

Amazing Maurice and his Educated Rodents, the first Discworld book marketed for children. He received the

World Fantasy Award for Life Achievement in 2010.

In December 2007, Pratchett announced that he was suffering from early-onset Alzheimer's disease.[12] He

later made a substantial public donation to the Alzheimer's Research Trust[13] (now Alzheimer's Research

UK), filmed a television programme chronicling his experiences with the disease for the BBC, and also

became a patron for Alzheimer's Research UK.[14] Pratchett died on 12 March 2015, aged 66.Pratchett died

at his home on the morning of 12 March 2015 from his Alzheimer's, according to his publisher.[69] The

Telegraph reported an unidentified source as saying that despite his previous discussion of assisted suicide,

his death had been natural.[70] After Pratchett's death, his assistant, Rob Wilkins, wrote from the official

Terry Pratchett Twitter account:

At last, Sir Terry, we must walk together.

Terry took Death's arm and followed him through the doors and on to the black desert under the endless

night.

The End.

The use of small capitals is a reference to how the character of Death speaks in Pratchett's works.

Source: < http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/assisted-dying-bill-arguments-against-explained-1519278>, 2016/5/4

“Assisted dying bill: The arguments for and against explained”, by Lydia Smith, in 2015

The assisted dying bill will get its second reading in the House of Commons tomorrow (11 September,

2015) and if passed, will give terminally ill patients the right to die. One of the most controversial piece of

legislation ever proposed, some argue the decision is a straightforward humanitarian issue – a question of

granting those suffering the freedom to end their own life. Others view assisted dying as a moral dilemma

with implications for the medical profession and the ageing population of the UK.

Ahead of the vote on Friday, here are some of the key arguments for and against assisted dying.

Arguments for

The ethical argument states a terminally ill, mentally competent adult should be able to exert their own

free will and after meeting strict legal safeguards, ought to be able to take a prescribed medication which

would end their own life. Supporters of the ethical argument suggest people should have the freedom of

choice, including the right to control their body and life, as long as they do not affect the rights of others.

The concept of "quality of life" is an important aspect of this argument. For example, if a terminally ill

person is living in intolerable pain or their quality of life is severely diminished, the supporters of assisted

dying may suggest they should have the right to die.

Dignity in Dying, an organisation campaigning to legalise assisted dying with upfront safeguards for

terminally ill, mentally competent adults, states on its website: "Without a change in the law, dying people


will suffer against their wishes at the end of life and will continue to make decisions without the advice of

medical or social care professionals. We believe that high-quality end-of-life care should be complemented

by the choice of an assisted death for terminally ill, mentally competent adults who meet strict safeguards

and feel their suffering has become unbearable."

Some – but not all – medical professionals have argued that forcing people to travel abroad to end their

own lives in distressing circumstances is inconsistent with patient-centred care. Another argument posed by

supporters is that assisted dying would not affect medical practices negatively, but provide safeguards to a

practice already being carried out.

Proponents of assisted dying may argue that dying people who want to control the manner and timing of

their death are not suicidal – which goes against the argument that assisted dying amounts to suicide or

euthanasia.

Supporters of approving Friday's bill often cite the US state of Oregon, where assisted dying has been

legal since 1997, say there have been no cases of abuse of the law and no widening of its initial scope.

Assisted deaths in Oregon account for 0.3% of total deaths, according to the Oregon Health Authority

Oregon's Death with Dignity Act (2014) and Washington State Department of Health Death with Dignity Act

Report (2014).

What is the assisted dying bill?

The bill, tabled by MP for Wolverhampton South West Rob Marris, would allow doctors to prescribe a

lethal dose to terminally ill patients judged to have six months or less to live who request the right to die.

A patient would have an assessment to make sure they had formed a "clear and settled intention" to end

their life and their decision would need approval from two doctors and a high court judge. Under the

legislation, the drugs would have to be self-administered.

Arguments against

One of the arguments frequently posed against assisted dying is that advances in palliative care could

reduce the chances of a terminally ill person feeling like they are suffering intolerably. Proponents of this

argument may suggest that if a person is given the right care in the correct environment, there should be no

reason why they are unable to have a dignified, natural death.

Another argument posed ahead of the bill states that the vulnerable elderly may see themselves as a

burden on their family or society so may feel encouraged to end their lives. It has been suggested that

approving the assisted dying bill may encourage some to die if they believe they are a burden on others.

Some critics of assisted dying suggest approving Friday's bill could set a dangerous precedent for

euthanasia – a so-called "slippery slope" to widening rules on euthanasia and assisted suicide. It has been

argued that assisted suicide could be akin to asking medical professionals to abandon their obligation to

preserve human life and, as a result, damage doctor-patient relationships.

Occasionally, doctors may be mistaken about a person's diagnosis and outlook, and the person may

choose assisted suicide after being wrongly told that they have a terminal condition. Critics say the

safeguards outlined in the bill are not enough to protect against unnecessary deaths.

Kevin Yuill, spokesperson for No To Assisted Suicide and author of Assisted Suicide: The Liberal,

Humanist Case Against Legalisation, told IBTimes UK: "The truth is that the whole issue here is suicide. I

am opposed to this bill because I don't think we should be in the business of yelling "jump" at someone atop

of a high building. Nor do I think we should offer to give a push.


"The understandable fears and anxieties of people who have been given a terminal prognosis are not best

dealt with by helping to kill them. Instead, we should increase the availability of hospice care."

1. Why does assisted dying remain a controversial subject in society nowadays? How will you define

“human right” in relation to this issue?

2. What are the reasons that motivated Terry Pratchett to go on his journey? What are the strengths or

limitations in the making of this video?

3. In the video, Ludwig A Minelli, the founder of Dignitas where assisted dying is provided as a service,

told Terry that “the right to self-determination should include also the right to make a decision upon

one’s own end” and “21% of people receiving assisted dying in Dignitas do not have terminal or

progressive illnesses but rather a weariness of life.” Do you agree that humans have a right to die “even

if s/he appear to be fit and well”? Why or why not?

4. As Mr. Minelli explained to Terry, about 70% of the members who are still living will never call again

after they gained the permission to assisted dying. How does Mr. Minelli come up with the remark that

“Knowing that you can…often means that you won’t. To know that you can go gives you strength”?

How does this “knowing” make a difference in relation to a person’s choice?

Do you have a bucket-list? Why are they important to you? Please share it with your group.

What is your passion? Is there anything that you genuinely believe to be worth the sacrifice and are

willing to suffer for?

Group work: Hold a debate

Suggested topics:

- Should assisted dying be legal in Taiwan?

- Shall we ban death penalty in Taiwan?

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