Welcome to the Departure Lounge: Adventures in Mothering Mother »

Meg Federico regularly writes humor for the National Post. Her work has appeared in The Globe and Mail, Shambhala Sun, and Agni Magazine (Boston University Press). She has written commentary and created documentaries for CBC Radio. For several years, she wrote a successful column, “Transitions: Issues in Caregiving,” for the Halifax Daily News. She lives in Halifax, Nova Scotia, with her family.

The adventure begins when Meg’s 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, she’s 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.

Addie’s accident is a portent of things to come over the next two years as Meg oversees her mother’s home care in the Departure Lounge, the nickname Meg gives Addie and Walter’s 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 Addie’s attendant accuses the evening staff of midnight voodoo; as the increasingly demented Walter’s sex drive becomes unbridled and mail-order sex aids are delivered to the front door. Meg jumps in to cope with the pandemonium–even 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 family–their moments of joy, the memories they’d rather forget, and the just plain loopiness of their situation. “How’s life at the Departure Lounge?” Meg’s brother asks. Meg doesn’t know where to start. “Let’s just say the drinks are outrageous, and they never run out of nuts.”

Publishers Weekly

In this frank account, by turns sad and terribly funny, the journalist Federico describes how her distant, patrician octogenarian mother, Addie, grew batty and vulnerable. Federico, the youngest of Addie's five children, rearranged her life with her own family in Nova Scotia to fly back and forth over the course of several years to Oldhill, N.J., to assist, along with her brother William, her mother and her mother's Alzheimer's-addled second husband, Walter. Recently married (Addie's first husband, the author's father, died of a heart attack years before), the couple drank heavily, complicating Walter's tendency to become abusive and Addie's physical frailty and bad eyesight. Finally, constant home care was required for the couple, necessitating the hiring of a team of revolving, frequently in-fighting workers, some truly caring, others downright crooked. The house became a disaster zone, christened the Departure Lounge, where the inhabitants erupted in loony non sequiturs and erratic behavior. Addie would put on all her jewelry and sing show tunes (until the jewelry mysteriously disappeared); Walter began receiving sex toys in the mail; and a trip to the bank resulted in $1,600 in dollar bills flying out of the limo window on the way home. Federico gently delineates the humiliating burden caused by the loss of memory, while humanely portraying a brave new sympathy and understanding between her mother and herself. (Feb.)

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