Central Skagit Library District

Learning that he does not have long to live and will need to figure out how to provide for his developmentally disabled adult son, a widower signs up as a census taker for a mysterious government bureau and leaves town with his son on a cross-country journey.

"Joshua and Lauren are the perfect couple. Newly married, they're wildly in love, each on a successful and rewarding career path. Then Lauren is diagnosed with a terminal illness. As Lauren's disease progresses, Joshua struggles to make the most of the time he has left with his wife and to come to terms with his future- a future without the only woman he's ever loved. He's so consumed with finding a way to avoid the inevitable ending that he never...

Sixteen-year-old Hazel, a stage IV thyroid cancer patient, had accepted her terminal diagnosis until a chance meeting with a boy at cancer support group forces her to reexamine her perspective on love, loss, and life.

A terminally ill cancer patient is attended throughout his final days by his wife and daughter while the trio contemplates their relationships with an estranged son, a situation that stirs up painful memories for a new next-door neighbor who has recently lost her mother.

A self-anointed spinster at fifty-one, Myra Lipinski is reasonably content with her quiet life, her dog, Frank, and her career as a visiting nurse. But everything changes when Chip Reardon, the golden boy she adored in high school, is assigned as her new patient. Choosing to forgo treatment for an incurable illness, Chip has returned to his New England hometown to spend what time he has left. Now, Myra and Chip find themselves engaged in a poignant...

"When Queenie Hennessy is told she has days to live she sends a letter on pink paper in which she bids goodbye to Harold Fry. It is a letter that inspires an unlikely walk, a cast of well-wishers, and the examination of many lives unlived. But there is a second letter, a longer, quieter more complicated letter which she will never send. It is this letter, the one we did not know about in [the author's previous book] The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold...

"A Black father makes amends with his gay son through letters written on his deathbed in this wise and penetrating novel of empathy and forgiveness, for fans of Ta-Nehisi Coates, Robert Jones Jr. and Alice Walker. As Jacob lies dying, he begins to write a letter to his only son, Isaac. They have not met or spoken in many years, and there are things that Isaac must know. Stories about his ancestral legacy in rural Arkansas that extend back to slavery....

Jimmy Tock comes into the world on the very night his grandfather leaves it. Rudy Tock spends long hours walking the corridors between the expectant fathers' waiting room and his dying father's bedside. When Josef Tock suddenly sits up in bed and speaks for the first and last time since his stroke, he says that there will be five dark days in the life of his grandson-each occurring at different times of his life. Rudy is all too ready to discount...

Canadian American leftist documentary filmmaker Leonard Fife was one of thousands of draft evaders and deserters who fled to Canada to avoid serving in Vietnam. Now in his late seventies and dying of cancer in Montreal, Fife has agreed to a final interview in which he is determined to bare all his secrets at last, to demythologize his mythologized life. The interview is filmed by his acolyte and ex-star student, Malcolm MacLeod, in the presence of...

"The Hope Chest is a deeply emotional novel about three people who have seemingly lost all hope until one woman's heirloom hope chest is rediscovered in the attic, along with its contents and secrets. Mattie is a fiercely independent woman battling ALS; Don, her deeply devoted husband is facing a future without his one true love; and Rose, their struggling caregiver, is a young, single mother who feels trapped in her life. With each item that is discovered--including...