Given the medical diagnosis of one year to live, high school senior Ben Wolf decides to fulfill his greatest fantasies, ponders his life's purpose and legacy, and converses through dreams with a spiritual guide known as "Hey-Soos."

Diagnosed with leukemia at the age of thirteen, Dawn starts her chemotherapy. She becomes best friends with her roommate, Sandy, and both go into remission. But when Sandy gets sick again, Dawn wonders what the future holds, both for Sandy and for her.

"Matelda, the Cabrelli family’s matriarch, has always been brusque and opinionated. Now, as she faces the end of her life, she is determined to share a long-held secret with her family about her own mother’s great love story: with her childhood friend, Silvio, and with dashing Scottish sea captain John Lawrie McVicars, the father Matelda never knew. . . . In the halcyon past, Domenica Cabrelli thrives in the coastal town of Viareggio until her...

1922 opens with the confession of Wilfred James to the murder of his wife, Arlette, due to a long-standing argument about farmland willed to Arlette by her father. In "Big Driver", mystery writer Tess has been supplementing her writing income for years by doing speaking engagements with no problems. But following a last-minute invitation to a book club 60 miles away, she takes a shortcut home with dire consequences. Suffering from cancer, Dave Streeter...

Camille Harte makes her living as a matchmaker. When she receives the diagnosis she's dreaded and learns she has only six months to live, she decides to do the unthinkable: find a replacement wife for her husband.

When Eliot and Laura Banner learn that Laura has a terminal condition, they gather their children and family around themselves during the holiday season to convey her blessings to them for the future and remember their shared history.

"[T]wo sisters seek a new balance in work, family, and love when one receives a diagnosis that sets the clock ticking. Determined to save Sherri's life, Kristen drops everything to guide her sister on the harrowing cancer treatment journey. When she's unable to balance the strain of caring for her patients, being a wife and mother, and her frantic efforts to save her sister, Kristen's carefully balanced life crumbles, starting with her marriage....

Resigned to her life alone, fifty-one-year-old spinster Myra Lipinsky endures her isolation by immersing herself in her career as a visiting nurse, in which role she is reunited with Chip Reardon, the onetime golden boy she adored from afar in high school, who has returned to his New England hometown to live while he deals with an incurable illness.

A girl preparing to visit her seriously ill uncle in the hospital imagines being a skywriter and flying over his bed with a message of love.

The five stages of grief, first formulated in this hugely influential work, are now part of our common understanding of loss. Ideal for all those with an interest in bereavement, this classic text is reissued with a new introduction looking at its influence on contemporary thought and practice.