If you don't love Roz Chast to pieces you can't be my friend.

If you haven't already watched your folks die get ready, you will. It sucks.

And if the fates allow, you will watch one or both of them move to the World of Dementia. It totally sucks.

I love Roz Chast.

I saw her phenomenal excerpt of this in (of course) the New Yorker. Utterly heartwrenching. At 48, I feel incredibly fortunate to still have my folks around and in good health. And yet, to know that this is what awaits is already painful. This is one of the rare benefits of being among the generation just after the boomers: the most talented of their lot, expressing what awaits me just around that NEXT corner.

I'm sick to death of reading peoples' heartwrenching/heartwarming/quirky tales of their parents' decline. Great cartoons aside, it's cruel. When all of you get a bit older than 48, you'll probably be creeped out also. By then so many of us will be in dementia, these books will be coming out in dozens each day.

My mother requested that I play a particular song at her funeral when I was about 20. Whenever I hear this song now (I'm 28) I can essentially see this coming day with her dead. However far off it may be now, it will nevertheless happen and it will happen in a more real way than my own death. Roz's work is an unflinching look at these intervening years.

This book is SO SO SO good. I recently read it while traveling alone cross country by train. It felt like the perfect companion for sitting in a tiny room for two days watching the world go by.

It's beautifully written and full of a mix of love and exasperation that I hope I never feel for my parents.