Births mark beginnings, while funerals toll in endings. Yet there resides so much in-between drama in the timeline of an extended family: moments of intense joy, times of heart-wrenching grief, and the day-to-day plodding of ups and downs that color the struggle with loss in all of human existence. In a series of linked short stories that superbly capture the emotions her characters' experience, the author deftly chronicles the personal episodes that transform the lives of five Italian-American cousins during the final years before the death of one of the family patriarchs.