A mother tries to make sense of the horrifying reality that all three of her sons may die of AIDS. A young woman whose manic depressive mother has died and whose father has remarried welcomes her own unborn child and recognizes the complicated source of her own maternity. A young woman faces the loss of her husband to kidney disease after he has donated a kidney to her own brother. A family and a surgeon respond to the challenges of heart surgery on a young child. A nineteen-year-old girl comes of age dealing with a rare cancer. A menopausal scientist seeks a kundalini experience that never comes. A woman, after a visionary experience, believes she has the power to heal. The spirits and voices of the characters in these twelve stories are fierce, raging, funny, loving and surprisingly generous as they struggle to discover what can illumine and sustain them and those they love.