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.

One Mother's Day, two old women reflect on their relationships with their children--present and absent--and with the same adulterous man. When their paths cross at a crucial moment, one woman's refusal to accept the help of her husband's secret lover leads to her death.

Two women, once the closest of childhood friends, chart diametrically opposite courses through life when scandal drives them apart. Thirty years later, a chance reunion prompts one of them to question everything.

A woman's complicated relationship to her mother is captured in three vignettes: one from directly after her death, one from when she is still alive, and one from years after she is gone.

In the 1980s, when one of the women in a New York female friend group is on the brink of death, her friends reflect on their children, particularly the ones who are gone, and their attachments to each other.

On the day of her mother's funeral, a young woman reminisces about the summers during her childhood spent with her family and friends at their lakeside cabin. As she considers her parents' nontraditional relationship, she also wonders about her own love life.

A young mother mourns the death of her firstborn child, a son, three days after his birth and falls into a bout of depression.

After their only child dies during his gap year abroad, a woman reflects on her relationship with her husband and comes to understand that they deal with fear and grief in different ways.

A teenager learns how to cope with the premature loss of his father. Through a newly developed relationship with his uncle, he discovers a new version of his father he wasn't privy to during his life.

A seventy-something-year-old woman dutifully visits her husband's grave only to realize that she contributed to the unhappiness of her marriage by letting her husband die lonely and unwanted.