Greta G's Reviews > Last Things: A Graphic Memoir of Loss and Love

At the end of their sabbatical year in Rome, things start to go wrong. Harvey is tired all the time and gasping for breath. He also starts to stutter. The doctors have no idea what’s wrong. Only months later, he’s diagnosed with ALS or Lou Gehrig’s disease.
Regular ALS starts with weakness in the arms and legs. Eventually you end up in a wheelchair, completely immobile. When you can’t breathe anymore, you die, usually five to seven years after the diagnosis. But Harvey has Bulbar ALS, which starts with the tongue and throat muscles. Death is generally two years after the diagnosis.

The impact of the diagnosis on Harvey is drastic. Harvey retreats in his office and shuts his wife Marissa and their three young sons out. Marissa doesn’t recognize this man anymore.

“Harvey’s not sad. He’s furious. At me. He’s never yelled at me before. Now, in an instant, my warm, loving husband for nearly twenty years is cold with rage.
It’s shock, I tell myself. Later we’ll cry together, hold each other.
But we don’t. I’m sealed off in the Land of the Not–Dying.”

Harvey’s health condition deteriorates quickly, and Marissa is soon consumed with caring for Harvey while trying to keep life as normal as possible for her young children.

“Do the boys understand what’s happening to us? Is it better for them to know or not know? How do you make a father’s dying easier for a child? I have no answers, no idea what to do. And Harvey won’t help. Or maybe he can’t.”



The enormity of what Marissa is responsible for is crushing. Harvey is the one she’d turn to for help with all this. Only she can’t. She has to face it all alone.
Maybe Harvey needs to be distant. Maybe that’s how he faces death.

“Is dying like that? Something that takes all your focus, all your concentration? A physical demand that strips away your sense of self? Have I already lost Harvey to the process of dying?”

Marissa Moss’s sad story hit me hard. This is a poignant story of how she, her husband and their children struggled to cope with Harvey’s terminal illness. Her writing as well as her black-and-white illustrations are straightforward and honest. This is a book that’s impossible to put down once you start reading it.

“The pace of the disease still surprises me. We plunge down its steep slope, flailing desperately to stay upright, until we skid to a halt. Before we have time to assess the new landscape, the ground shifts again, pulling us down with it. There is no status quo to get used to, only the dizzying wrenching of our feet out from under us, the powerful, inexorable avalanche of the disease’s progression.”



In addition to writing this book, she also finished the book Harvey —who was a medieval art historian— had been working on for more than fifteen years, Picturing Kingship: History and Painting in the Psalter of Saint Louis, a book about King Louis IX’s personal psalter.

“Writing is a way for me to find myself again and to reclaim Harvey, who he was before he got sick. Reading his words is like having a conversation with him again, hearing how he thinks, his passion for art and history.”