Hoo boy. This was so raw and painful and true, and made darkly hilarious and heartbreaking by Roz Chast's cartoons. We will all be Roz; we will all be her parents. It is all so heavy, yet worth looking at as unflinchingly as possible. And maybe hugging our siblings if we have them, and starting another savings account? 
 (view spoiler)[ 
 "One of the worst parts of senility must be that you have to get terrible news over and over again. On the other hand, maybe in between the times of knowing the bad news, you get to forget it and live as if everything was hunky-dory." 
 "I wish that, at the end of life, when things were truly 'done,' there was something to look forward to. Something more pleasure-oriented. Perhaps opium, or heroin. So you become addicted. So what? All-you-can-eat ice cream parlors for the extremely aged. Big art picture books and music. EXTREME palliative care, for when you've had it with everything else: the x-rays, the MRIs, the boring food, and the pills that don't do anything at all. Would that be so bad?" (hide spoiler)]