Editor’s Note: Meg Federico, author of Welcome to the Departure Lounge: Adventures in Mothering Mother, 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.

But you can get your face lifted from here to Venus; you still might end up with a walker and a diaper. With that in mind, my friends and I script end-of-life scenarios that give us a sense of hope — where "hope" is the option to avoid those extra decades that modern medicine offers us. When I was a kid, bored on a Saturday afternoon, I’d amuse myself by wondering which is worse: boiling or freezing to death. Now, 40 years later. I’m thinking about it again. Because, let’s face it, human beings can expect to live longer than ever, but secretly — unless we’re "sharp as a tack" and "fit as a fiddle" — most of us hope we won’t have to.

So with forced bravado, Julie and I cooked up a scheme we call the Final Martini. Resplendent in our formal attire (we spend a fair amount of time planning our outfits), we imagine a drive to the beach and a terminal cocktail (we haven’t figured out what exactly goes into it), imbibed as the tide goes out under a setting sun. And it turns out Julie and I aren’t the only ones with secret plans. My cousin Elizabeth, pro-freezing even as a kid, says she’ll walk into the woods on a cold snowy night with a bottle of cognac. Ever the practical one, prior to her moonlight hike Elizabeth plans to mail a letter to the cops detailing her location.

"I wouldn’t want some poor stranger walking a dog to find me." My, doesn’t she think of everything?                   

Jean, my control freak, marathon-running doctor friend, shares this cheerful thought: "I’m likely to get run over by a truck on the highway when I’m out jogging." "What if you don’t?" I ask. "A self-administered overdose," she counters, matter-of-factly.

Sounds so simple, yet glitches abound. Where will she hide her stash of pills? "Oh, in the back of my bathroom drawer," she says airily. Her children are all male. In my household, the girls ransack my drawers on a regular basis. They have a better idea of the contents than I do. They’d have no difficulty putting two and two together and relieving poor old Mom of her exit strategy.  

Some of my pals are less hard-core. For Carolyn, the concrete details are taboo. "I’m an optimist," she says vaguely. "I hope to go to sleep and not wake up." A nice thought, but you may as well hope for eternal youth.

Statistically speaking, after age 75 you may very well have arthritis, macular degeneration, dementia, incontinence and a lot more face time with your doctor. If you wind up in the care system, you’ll never be alone long enough to mix up the gin and strychnine. To carry out your exit plan, you need strength, gumption — and privacy.