An elderly woman and her aged husband find their marriage breaking apart after over forty years together. He wants to sell their house and move to a cooperative society for the elderly where they can live out the rest of their lives in peace. However, she does not agree - she has spent her life living for other people, and now cannot tolerate the thought of giving up the peace she worked so hard for. Their relationship devolves into bitter fighting, and he threatens to sell the house without her consent. At this, all her bitterness vanishes, and she looks very sad. As the days pass, she is unable to do as much around the house as she did before, and when the doctors test her, they discover that she has cancer and will only survive for a month or so longer. All his plans for selling the house have now evaporated. He cannot sell the house, and even his children insist that this last year of his wife's life must be made happy and comfortable. They burn through their savings going to their children's houses, but she simply longs to go home and cannot find it within herself to burden the lives of her children by living with them. Even though he tries to hide her fatal diagnosis from her, she surmises from the look in his eyes that she does not have very long to live. In the last days of her illness, she is delirious and singing songs from her childhood, repeating snippets of words that had been said to her children and to everyone else in her life. Sitting by her bedside, her repentant and humiliated husband realises that their financial struggles had strained her more than he could have imagined, and he feels guilty for not realising it sooner. At last he begins to hope for a quick death for her, so that her body does not have to suffer. Their granddaughter, Jeannie, helps him care for her. When she is dying, the pain is so terrible that he cannot watch. Jeannie follows him out of the room, urging him not to cry, but to come back to the room and help her grandmother die.