Welcome to the Departure Lounge
by Meg Federico (read by Tamara Marston)
Audible, Inc (audiobook)

If you found Sherwin Nuland's unusual best-seller, How We Die, interesting, you will embrace Welcome to the Departure Lounge. A candid, humorous and agonising tale with an ending you know at the start, it was written by Meg Federico about her octogenarian mother's last few years of life, when stroke, dementia, drink and a few spills turned her from an able wife and mother into someone unpredictable and childlike. It didn't help that Addie had a second husband whose mental health was also deteriorating. Federico writes about the many urgent trips she made from Nova Scotia to New Jersey, when she put her life - and that of her family - on hold to spend perhaps the last time with her mother. 'This time, she better die,' she remembers thinking. 'And then you feel terrible.' Anecdotes are recounted without mawkishness. Last Call, the final chapter, will have you in tears even as Addie makes a comeback for her 83rd birthday and gurgles with laughter at the realisation that she has been pronounced dead prematurely.