Ida's family is throwing her a 'birthday tea" for her eighty-sixth birthday. Their efforts to be cheerful and make the event a success verge on the desperate. Ida is racked with pain and feels she has lived too long. Susan, the prodigal daughter who has been away for 25 years, arrives to find that her mother has only brief periods of lucidity and appears not to remember her. After the party is over and the family have dispersed, it is Katherine, Ida's eldest daughter, who is left to look after her. Katherine is tortured by the promise she made to her mother not to let her suffer, and after several bungled attempts, is finally able to "help" her mother die. When the family find out what she has done, a can of worms is opened as they struggle with their consciences and individual inadequacies. All the old family prejudices and rivalries are forced out into the open in a sometimes hilarious, painful and moving picture of a family in turmoil.