The plan had always been that eventually Alex McCollister would go first. But a year after he took early retirement, Alex lost his wife of 32 years to cancer. He never contemplated the devastating pain or loneliness of losing the most important person in his life. The pain of his loss, and the pain of a new medical condition, were almost too much to bear. 'Can't you just cut the damn thing out?' he asks his doctor. But the Doc and a young woman named Patricia had other things in store for him. And what seemed like a hopeless dead end, became, for Alex McCollister, the beginning of a new life.