Margaret is an old woman preparing herself for death in all the common ways: she receives her last rites, she is visited by family and friends, and she doles out advice to the neighbors who drop in to make subtle goodbyes. In the time when she isn’t being brought back to reality by visitors, Margaret daydreams. She reminisces on all of her stories, and all the stories she’s been told by her loved ones. Though she never wanted to have children, she found herself adopting people as though they were her children. Decades of taking people into her heart and listening to their stories have left Margaret with textbooks worth of intimate history.  Many of the memories she dwells on are several decades old, but this changes when her niece, Anna, visits with her daughter. Anna had intended to sew her daughter a coat from some fine fabric that Margaret had, but when she’s not looking, her daughter sews it into a coat of her own design. Initially rising in anger, Anna laughs it off when she sees how pleased Margaret is by it, chuckling louder than she’s heard her in recent years. Margaret implores Anna to cherish a moment like this, especially because the coat her daughter made isn’t half bad.  Opening up, Margaret admits that her biggest fear is that when she dies, it is not only her own life that is lost, but the countless lives of the girls whom she’s come to know over her lifetime. She is fearful that when she goes, there will be no one left to remember those women, and they’ll all fade into oblivion. Anna reassures her, saying that there is still substantial time before her death, and in those days, she’ll listen to all of the stories Margaret has and keep them with her. They spend many days together and Margaret is greatly relieved, so much so that even the priest says that she has taken on a heavenly appearance, clearly at peace and blessed. Margaret dies within a few weeks, and leaves all the little forms of her past life with her niece.