After 20 years of living with a chronic illness, Zoe FitzGerald Carter's mother decided to end her life - and asked her three daughters to help her. For months, the decision dragged on as her mother changed her methods and her "death dates," stirring up difficult family memories, sibling rivalries, and questions about love and loyalty. 

As Zoe and her sisters struggled to accept their mother's choice, they circled around the same questions: Who among them was willing to help her? Would they go to jail? And could they bear to let her die alone? With a doctor prescribing lethal doses of sleep medication, a visit from a member of the Hemlock Society's "Final Exit Network", and the temptations of overdosing on morphine, the issues raised by Imperfect Endings are at the center of the debate on assisted suicide. Capturing the stresses and joys of the "sandwich generation," Carter's memoir is the story of a woman determined to die on her own terms and the family who has to leran to let her go.