“But sometimes trying to remember things is like attempting to scoop slippery fish out of a muddy pool with bare hands. I make the occasional contact and even hold on for a short time, but then the images, sounds and emotions slip away again and I’m jerked back to the immediate, the now, which is always such a huge let-down. I’ve possessed a sharp mind all my life. It’s been the cornerstone of my success and my whole self-image. Without it, what am I?”

Lily Harford’s Last Request is the first novel by Australian journalist and author, Joanna Buckley. Lily Harford just wants to die. It's true that at eighty-seven she has had an amazing life: widowed early, but establishing and maintaining her own accounting business for almost forty years, raising Pauline as a single mother, grandmother to Rachel, great grandmother to Luke and Rosie: her family and friends agree she has always been a formidable figure.

“A femininely handsome woman, she had always been a living embodiment of the traits she’d espoused to Pauline from a young age– strength and capability, confidence and willpower, optimism and control. Solid at every turn. And in recent years a long-retired great-grandmother, still so vibrant, so hard wearing. Not like now.”

Having to give up her beloved home on King Street, to enter Finn Bay’s Blue Vista Care Facility, to lose her independence? Heart-breaking. Her recall has been frustratingly faulty of late, and that worries her family, perhaps more than it does Lily.

But as she becomes aware of her own deterioration, she remembers her own father’s slow and lingering death, and is desperate to avoid that fate: “I’m not frightened of death. I’ve had a full and long life. But I need to go on my terms while I still have some control, before this narrow window closes on me and I no longer even know that that’s what I want.”

Donna Charleston loves her job as a caring assistant at Blue Vista, loves the residents, and loves doing whatever she can to make their lives enjoyable. When Lily begs for her help to die, she’s not surprised or shocked: she can well understand why but, as she explains repeatedly, she just can’t risk her job or her freedom. And it’s not only Donna from whom Lily begs this mercy: it’s no spoiler to reveal that someone eventually agrees to help her die.

Meanwhile, Pauline Walters is dismayed to see her mother’s decline, afraid of losing her altogether: “a recognition that everything Pauline was, everything her life had rested itself upon with confidence and reassurance, was bound up with her mother’s fortitude and mental strength, her almost-invincibility. Without these, it was as if the whole lot– all that Pauline had known to be dependable and true about her mother and therefore herself– could tumble at any moment.”

The story plays out over some eighteen months and is carried by three narrators: Lily, Pauline and Donna. Lilly’s narrative includes flashbacks that reach progressively further into her past, these incidents gradually revealing her history. An epilogue six years on provides a neat resolution.

Buckley presents the reader with a picture of ageing, dementia and the right to die from three perspectives: the sufferer, the carer and the close family member. She gives the reader an insightful depiction of the anguish, the grief as severe as if the person had already died, that family (in this case, most especially Pauline), suffer as they mourn the strong woman they all admired and loved.

Buckley’s characters are multi-faceted and by no means perfect: a daughter who works too hard, expecting far too much of herself; a son-in-law whose heart is in the right place, even if his head hasn’t always been; a carer undermined by a toxic family and partner, all demonstrate that life doesn’t hold back on the challenges to be faced. This novel offers a sober treatment of a serious topic, not often lightened by humour: a thought-provoking read.
This unbiased review is from an uncorrected proof copy provided by NetGalley and Harlequin Australia