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.

As she begins to feel that her boyfriend is trying to create reasons for her to leave him, a woman tries to understand his difficult past as a child in the American foster care system.

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.

As a woman prods her ill-tempered mother to move into a nursing home, a strange encounter prompts her to reflect on their lifelong, often rocky relationship.

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.

After hiring multiple caretakers, one after another, a family finds a near perfect woman whom they adore. However, they are met with a surprise when the caretaker's term comes to an end.

Gloria, a young woman with a fatal cancer, visits her eccentric friend and her equally strange daughter, but her plans are thrown off course when the daughter asks Gloria to kidnap her.

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.

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.

A man tries to understand the relationship between his aging mother and her African caretaker, attempting to evade his own prejudices in order to better comprehend their connection.