When I found out my grandmother, my last living grandparent, was dying, my first thought was, "I need to draw her hands."
I'm a visual artist, a cartoonist for "The New Yorker," and comics writer, so drawing is how I understand much of the world. For a long time, my cartoons had been impersonal. Commentary on the world around me, sure, but not really about me. The closest my personal life got to influencing my cartoons were cartoons I lifted from things my friends and family had said around me.
[Dolly, twenty years later]
["I've become my mother"]
(Laughter)
It was only after my daughter, Elika, was born, that my personal life began to creep into my cartoons more.
["I have a feeling he understands more than we think."]
(Laughter)
Every artist will tell you that their medium is the highest art form, but they're wrong because cartooning is in fact the highest art form.
(Laughter)
For example --
["You could have told me]
[I've been talking to your ass for 15 minutes"]
(Laughter)
Not a great example, the next one's better.
["I know I have a condom in here somewhere."]
(Laughter)
I was thinking of the next one. There you go.
(Laughter)
Cartoons can say so much with so little. With just a few lines, you can express happiness, smugness and sadness. This is called face pareidolia. It's the phenomenon where we see faces in inanimate objects. We see ourselves in these cartoonish faces. They're blank canvases onto which we project ourselves. We see faces everywhere, ourselves in everything. It's evolutionary, a survival technique. But how do we convey complex emotions using just lines, emotions like grief?
This became really important to me when I found out that my grandmother was dying. I got to know my grandmother Homa in a way I didn't get to know any of my other grandparents because they all lived and died in Iran, a country I’ve only ever been to twice, and not since I was 10. But Homa lived with my parents for the last 10 years of her life. And in that time she danced the funky chicken at my wedding, she got to hold my newborn daughter, and she told me stories about Iran before the revolution over morning tea, which was usually around noon because she liked to sleep in.
(Laughter)
One of my earliest memories is of her hands. Not the way that they looked, but the way that they felt. I can still, even today, recall the physical sensation of them, like the smoothness of her nails and even their smell, but not the way they looked. Which is why, when I found out that she was dying, my first instinct was to try to preserve that memory. My memory of her by drawing her hands. Not surprisingly, when I finally made it there to see her, I didn't have a whole lot of time to sit around drawing because I was busy with other things. Things like comforting my mom, comforting my grandmother by doing magic, and helping my mom and my sister plan for what would come next.
It's that classic Proustian experience. Life doesn't mean anything while you're moving through it, it's only when you stop to reflect on it that you can make any sense of it. Sense memory, what Proust calls involuntary memory, contains the essence of the past. And so if I wanted to tell the story of my Grandma Homa, I would have to begin with a sensation of her hands.
When I set out to write this comic, which was published in the “LA Times,” I wanted to take something complicated and big and make it small. Grief is complicated. I needed to reach a point where I could process my loss, to distill the experience of losing my last living grandparent into its essential parts and make it clear enough that I could actually grieve.
My family doesn't tend to deal well with grief, which isn't great because we have so much experience with it. When we're trying to dodge grief, we caricature those we've lost. We focus on and exaggerate their most obvious features, which is why sometimes we'll hear somebody say something like, "He was a saint." He probably wasn't.
(Laughter)
When we do that, we're not actually grieving. We're not confronting the person we've lost as a complex individual, flaws and all. Cartooning has allowed me to go narrow, to find the details that are emblematic, which opens up into a whole, rich, complex person and to my complicated relationship with them. It avoids flattening them and leaves them their richness so I can grieve all of them.
And so I focused on my grandmother's hands, the quivering lines of her arthritic fingers, the contours of her veins, now pronounced by the thinning of the skin that she spent so much time caring for. They were beautiful hands, soft from years of moisturizing. They were also the hands of someone who was really, really vain, emblematic of the gender norms of an Iranian woman of her period. And as a consequence, incapable of dealing with the process of aging well.
For example, I can remember this one time she called me into her room, and when I walked in, she was standing there, arms stretched out to her side and topless, and she said, "Look what I've become."
[Image not available]
(Laughter)
They were also the hands that she used, as she got older and was less capable of caring for herself, to hit those around her, the people she loved the most.
Because I didn't actually get to draw her hands when I last saw her, and I don't have any photos of them, I had to use my own hands to draw her hands. So I drew my hands old and spotted, my knuckles gnarled, and I imagined what it would be like for my hands to no longer be able to perform basic, everyday functions, to no longer be able to draw. I regularly use myself as a reference for my comics, so most of the photos on my phone look something like this.
(Laughter)
And through this, I have become my grandmother, I have become my friends, and I've even become my five-year-old daughter. It's a process that's allowed me to experience these stories more deeply, in a physical way, allowing me to inhabit them, to come to a fuller, richer understanding of them in context.
If a loved one's death makes us confront our own mortality, then the process of physically transforming myself into my grandmother or my father, who is slowly dying of kidney failure, has made me confront it in a uniquely deep way. This is a photo I took of myself in my dad's boots and jeans for a comic I did for "The New Yorker" about accompanying him to dialysis for the first time. It's a process that's also allowed me to reach a place of deeper empathy and of forgiveness.
For me, art is about communication. It's about expressing what's most important to us and knowing that other people feel the same way, that we're not alone, which is particularly important when we're grieving. It's that distillation of something complex into its simplest terms.
For you to see your grandmother or a parent in the curved lines of my grandmother's beautiful hands, and to communicate without words because words were never the point anyway.
Thank you.
(Applause)
