Writer Susan Tweit and her economist-turned-sculptor husband Richard Cabe had just settled into their version of a "e;good life"e; when Richard saw thousands of birds one day-harbingers of the brain cancer that would kill him two years later.
After both her parents die, Linda Murphy Marshall, a multi-linguist and professional translator, returns to her midwestern childhood home, Ivy Lodge, to sort through a lifetime of belongings with her siblings.
When Terry Repak and her husband moved to West Africa with two small children at the height of the AIDS epidemic in the 1990s, she seized the opportunity to connect with people of other cultures and bear witness to the ravages of the disease.