Comics That Help Us Face The End of Life

Part of the ongoing art exhibition - "Beyond the Ripples" - at The Laundry throughout Reimagine.

Humor and the comic form are unexpected and often welcome ways to broach difficult topics and situations. The cartoons in this exhibit use this premise with the hope that the works will offer a gentle, non-threatening invitation to Advance Care Planning and End of Life conversations.

This exhibition arises from two fields that use storytelling to explore extreme situations and the emotions they create: Graphic Medicine and Narrative Medicine. Graphic Medicine refers to the intersection between the medium of comics and the discourse of health care. Narrative Medicine refers health care practiced with narrative skills of recognizing, absorbing, interpreting, and being moved by the stories of illness.

The comics in this exhibit were created predominantly by cartoonists whose work appears in The New Yorker magazine. Many of the works are included in Never The Right Time, a mini comic anthology created by Lois Perelson-Gross to bridge people to talk about the sacred but often scary terrain of Advance Care Planning and End of Life.