This book is written as a memoir of 40-plus years of working with human experiences of death, grief, and bereavement. The stories are all similar but uniquely different; similar in the sense that they all relate to varying issues embedded in loss. They are different in how each of these losses occur. The author invites the reader into a world of overwhelming grief brimming with raw emotions. The stories are true and tackle the capricious and unpredictable nature of death in a society that seeks to avoid and overcome the reality of death.
Most of the stories are told from the perspective of a hospital chaplain working with real people. While these stories are profoundly sad, the author invites the reader to search for and find snippets of hope through a recommitment to life and living--constantly holding before the reader the dialectic tension that exists between life and death.