Dave Schaafsma's Reviews > Last Things: A Graphic Memoir of Loss and Love

Marissa Moss is the author of more than 40 books, most of them in her fictional children's series, Amelia's Notebooks, about what it means to be a girl at nine or ten, and so on. I had recently read her story of baseball in Japanese internment camps during WWII, Barbed Wire Baseball, and liked it, but this is a very different subject for her: The story of her husband's decline and death from ALS, or Lou Gehrig's Disease, and it is really well and powerfully told, with searing honest.

Everyone in the family handles the disease differently, but as Moss tells it, the most painful part of it for her was the separation between her and her loving husband that happens almost from the beginning. He's angry as hell, and whys shouldn't he be?! How would you handle it? Sometimes life challenges make you come together, but sometimes you fall apart, and maybe it's useful to know this so you can be prepared for your own emotional reactions to trauma.

Sure, it's about ALS, so as you can imagine it is nasty, brutal, and inexorable, and sure, it is sad, but my main emotional reaction was admiration for Moss's storytelling. I want to thank her for taking the time to tell her family story; it is very useful in helping us see (or remember, for some of us) the emotional effects of serious illness on a family. I highly recommend it.