A guide to preparing for death for both those who are dying and those around them, offers readers practical advice, stories, and personal experiences.

A moving story of love, friendship, grief, healing, and the magical bond between a woman and her dog. When a woman unexpectedly loses her lifelong best friend and mentor, she finds herself burdened with the unwanted dog he has left behind. Her own battle against grief is intensified by the mute suffering of the dog, a huge Great Dane traumatized by the inexplicable disappearance of its master, and by the threat of eviction: dogs are prohibited in...

"Rabbit, Run is the book that established John Updike as one of the major American novelists of his--or any other--generation. Its hero is Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom, a onetime high-school basketball star who on an impulse deserts his wife and son. He is twenty-six years old, a man-child caught in a struggle between instinct and thought, self and society, sexual gratification and family duty--even, in a sense, human hard-heartedness and divine grace....

Two sisters growing up in rural Oregon find their world shaken when they stumble across a dead woman in the river that runs through their father's property.

"After her brother's death from a congenital heart defect, twelve-year-old Lucy is not prepared to be the new kid at school -- especially in a grade full of survivors of a shooting that happened four years ago. Without the shared past that both unites and divides her classmates, Lucy feels isolated and unable to share her family's own loss, which is profoundly different from the trauma of her peers. Lucy clings to her love of math, which provides...

"When Michaela's mom dies and she has to move in with her dad, she discovers he's been married with kids all this time and she's the product of an affair"-- Michaela is a junior in high school, living with her single mom. Her dad lives a few towns away and she only sees him on holidays and birthdays. They barely know each other, but Michaela is so close with her mom that she's never minded. That is, until her mom dies suddenly, and Michaela has to...

The stories of three women: a mother, a wife, and a daughter who process their loss and grief through their art.

With insight and a light touch, best-selling, Newbery Honor-winning author Gary D. Schmidt tells two poignant, linked stories: that of a grieving girl and a boy trying to escape his violent past. Following the death of her closest friend in summer 1968, Meryl Lee Kowalski goes off to St. Elene's Preparatory Academy for Girls, where she struggles to navigate the venerable boarding school's traditions and a social structure heavily weighted toward students...

After a fatal crime is committed upon his wife and daughter, tough undercover cop John Hebron struggles to forgive himself for being unable to save them. Plagued by the past, he turns to the counsel of Father Porter, who has recently experienced his own problems when the church's Holy Mary statue falls into the hands of hoodlum vandals. Mike tries to rehabilitate his life for the sake of his little sister; he entrusts each man with something that...