My cartoon about the things people said to me and my family when my mom was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s Disease is now on the Alzheimer Society of Canada website.
Originally published in Geist magazine #52, Spring 2004.
5 thoughts on “People Say the Darnedest Things”
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This one still packs the same punch for me as when I first saw it a few years ago. When my folks died, there was one person whose very first words to me were, “I brought over a casserole for them when they were sick. Could I get the dish back?”
There was thoughtlessness there, and with other people the suffocating inability to let any incident go by without wrapping it in whatever narrow story they’ve latched onto to explain all of human experience. But I suspect there’s something else at work, too.
We’re uncomfortable with silences, especially when enormity is involved. And we’re scared of intense emotion. So instead of asking about the pain, we fill those awkward spaces with verbiage, with process, with explanation. We go to safe, intellectual places with often-damaging haste, and then kid ourselves that we’ve spared someone an injury.
I still do it. I’m trying to do it less.
All of which, by the way, was to say that this is a fantastic cartoon.
thank you, rob! i am still collecting. sigh. Donimo has some similar tres bons mots on http://chronicholiday.blogspot.com/.
did the the one on the bottom left put the dog down?
Why did I just see Georgia’s comment now? Eek. She did, eventually, but long after she should have. I am all about loving dogs like members of the family, but it was a bit much to have my mom compared to one!