After finding out that her toddler has cancer, a fiction writer and her husband living in the American Midwest do everything they can to save their baby, including giving up her artistic integrity in order to pay for the medical bills.

Having been hospitalized for a long time, a young girl finds herself surrounded by people who cannot understand the strangeness of her illness. After her friend visits her, she must accept that her relationships may never be the same, and that her expectations that tether her to a life outside of the hospital may be very different from the disappointing reality.

A brother and his sister disagree fundamentally on how to care for their dying mother. Death approaches sooner than anticipated, leaving the brother feeling lonelier than ever.

After a dying mother instructs her children to find their distant aunt and new guardian, they must step outside the home they have always known and embark on a journey toward their new life.

Three daughters in Florida care for their mother in the late stages of her cancer, meanwhile addressing their own strained relationships and trauma.

While witnessing his boys of his neighbor's family commit chaotic damage to the people of the neighborhood, a father continues to show kindness. The neighbor's family faces their own drama until they are no longer a part of the neighborhood.

A teacher in Washington tries to comfort one of his students—an orphan who is dying from a chronic disease—opting to be her guardian for the summer even in the face of her looming, imminent death.

Daughter Helen reflects on her pained childhood and strained adult life while on a train in Germany, where she is traveling to Munich with her sick mother to get an unconventional treatment for cancer.

In a town full of people with tuberculosis, the healthy young daughter of a nurse is teased by two wealthy but frail sisters. When she is caught lying about the cause of her father's death, the girl must figure out how to be proud of who she is.

When her son is diagnosed with a rare form of cancer, a woman on a job in England must find her way home and balance her work in architecture and life with her family in Chicago.