“I don’t like it. But sometimes it’s for the best.”

Joyce Farmer’s graphic memoir “Special Exits” is an unflinching portrayal of the final four years of her father and stepmother. No detail is spared, from bed baths to broken hips to bedsores, and the result is an extremely visceral description of the realities of aging parents. On a personal note, my mother was a caregiver to the elderly, so I am impressed at how effectively the dire situation of two sickly aging people on their own is portrayed. The few years before death are not only not represented by the media, books and movies, but it seems we don’t even talk about the eventuality of our own demise as a culture. Farmer’s book depicts something that happens to every adult at one point or another, but it feels like a stolen slice of any experience, something we don’t see everyday. When Laura goes shopping for the couple and you see all junk food they consume, I was a bit shocked, and then I realized, older folks do that, my own grandmother had done that (towards the end, all she would eat was her sugary Mexican pastries and hot chocolate with evaporated milk) I just hadn’t thought of the life of the elderly until it was presented to me.

Farmer’s overall tone, even with the book’s difficult themes, is warm throughout. The series of stories is focused to when Laura visits and the imagined happenings when Laura isn’t there. I don’t used the word “imagined” to say that Laura or Joyce made up these vignettes of Lars and Rachel alone but it does say that the stories are “based” on that of Joyce’s parents, and Joyce cannot have been present at the time the couple are illustrated alone. Those are situations she had to infer.

Farmer begins this upbeat tone in the first scene, when she is attacked openly by Lars and Rachel’s angry cat, Ching. Laura  remains this stoically unflustered throughout the memoir, only starting to unravel at the end, when she has to deal with Rachel’s nursing home malpractice and Lar’s hospice and passing. The first set of panels shows not only Laura getting attacked by Ching, but also her father Lars pulling up his sleeve to show Laura the myriad cat scratches on his arm, signaling to the reader that perhaps this couple is going to have issues with self care.

Another subtle element Farmer illustrates wonderfully is how decrepit Lars and Rachel’s living situation is and also how dangerous their neighborhood has become. On page 7 we watch Lars and Rachel go shopping for their junk food calmly, completely engrossed in their own conversation, and in the panel where they are loading up their car there are two armored guards looking menacing not far from them. During the LA riots, they remain nonplussed while their power goes out, and make pudding while Laura freaks out about their well being, since they can’t hear the phone to pick it up. Laura aptly shows how difficult it can be to take care of those who don’t seem to know an/or care how desperate their situation is. Years go by before either of the couple goes to the doctor, and when they do, it is at Laura’s bidding.

This subtlety of this story is effective in portraying the difficulty of Lars and Rachel’s situation without being overwrought, a tough right of passage for them and Laura that is illustrated in a way that shows the reader without shouting to them.