Evelyn Amdur, a hospice social worker, began to write these stories midway through her career, collaborating with her daughter, Shelley, a respected teacher of meditation. Many traditional cultures have a custom of "death songs", which rest on the idea that at one's last moment, one somehow sums up the essence of one's life in a phrase or a song. These are truly American death songs. Unlike the austere poetry of the Japanese which catch the evanescence of life in an image, both beautiful and stark, or the glorious courage of the warriors of the Great Plains, summing up their lives up in a final burst of ecstatic joy, here in language almost artless, in the simplicity of lives much like our own, a dignity rises, one common hero after another.
Woven into these stories are instructions on how to die well—or at least as well as we can—not only in what spirit we face death itself, but also through instructions on what is necessary to prepare our families, to ready our estates, and to manage all the players who may be involved in our deaths. Finally, these stories also teach others who hold the same responsibilities that Evelyn herself had, be they social services, medical staff, caregivers, or families—how to offer the dying as much grace as she did.