Louis Charles ("Lucy") Lynch has spent all his sixty years in upstate Thomaston, New York, married to the same woman, Sarah, for forty of them, their son now a grown man. Like his late, beloved father, Lucy is an optimist, though he's had plenty of reasons not to be -- chief among them his mother, still indomitably alive. Yet it was her shrewdness, combined with that Lynch optimism, that had propelled them years ago to the right side of the tracks...

Six writers recount end-of-life moments that cover a wide spectrum of human experience, from the man who smashed every dish in his house to the musician who treated on dying woman to the bouncy Beach Boys tune "Barbara Ann" and another to recordings of birdsong at midnight