When a young girl in a contemporary northwestern American town dies, one of her neighbors and former friends rethinks her relationship with death.

Determined his death is approaching, a man pays a last visit to both his wife's grave and his son's ghost and tries to say goodbye.

After a drunk college boy falls off a balcony, a slew of characters--a groundskeeper, another student, a chaplain, and an RA--relate to his death in different ways. Their stories are sidelined for the core matter: that a boy died.

An elderly woman prepares for her death, but is anxious for someone to listen to her precious memories and cherish them after her death.

In the days after his wife dies, an older man must confront his newly solitary life, both the good and the bad.

An old woman experiences several blackouts as she approaches death.

A woman comes home dreading her grandmother's funeral, but she finds that moments of shared sorrow allow families to come together and celebrate life.

A little girl sits down by her dying grandmother’s bedside to receive an important warning about how she should live her life with the knowledge that death will come to her, too.

After his retirement, an older man struggles to come to terms with his own mortality and begins to imagine death all around him, particularly when he hears coyotes howl near his house in the night.

In a series of commentaries on the human condition — life, truth, happiness, death — a spinster sister takes in her dead sister’s children; a man is entranced by the endless waves which roll and crash in the ocean; a carpenter wrestles with the burden of being everyone’s confidante; a dying railroad crossing watchman shares a simple but complex wisdom.