Welcome to the Departure Lounge

The adventure begins when Megs mother, Addie, vacationing in Florida, takes a spill. At the hospital, Addie bolts upright on her gurney and yells I demand an autopsy! before passing out cold.One minute, she is unconscious, the next, shes nuts, observes Meg Federico in this hilarious and poignant memoir of taking care of eighty-year-old Addie and her relatively new (and equally old) husband, Walter, in their not-so-golden years. Addies accident is a portent of things to come over the next two years as Meg oversees her mothers home care in the Departure Lounge, the nickname Meg gives Addie and Walters house in suburban New Jersey. It is a place of odd behaviors and clashing caregivers, where chaos and confusion reign supreme.Meg had expected that Addie and Walter would settle into a Rockwellian dotage of docile dependency. Instead the pair regress into terrible teens. Meg watches from the sidelines in disbelief as her mother and stepfather, forbidden by doctors to drink, conspire to order cases of scotch by phone; as Addies attendant accuses the evening staff of midnight voodoo; as the increasingly demented Walters sex drive becomes unbridled and mail-order sex aids are delivered to the front door. Meg jumps in to cope with the pandemoniumeven as she struggles to manage her own family back in Nova Scotia.With a fresh voice and a keen eye for the absurd, Meg Federico writes a story that will resonate with the generation now caring for their parents. Welcome to the Departure Lounge is a moving and madcap chronicle of a familytheir moments of joy, the memories theyd rather forget, and the just plain loopiness of their situation. Hows life at the Departure Lounge? Megs brother asks. Meg doesnt know where to start. Lets just say the drinks are outrageous, and they never run out of nuts.