"A vibrant, heartfelt memoir about confronting mortality, surviving loss, finding resilience in one's Midwest roots and seeking a father's wisdom through an unusual woodworking project--constructing his own coffin." -- Amazon.com

After drinking an elixir that bestows immortality upon him, a young Indian named Flapping Eagle spends the next seven hundred years sailing the seas with the blessing-and ultimately the burden-of living forever. Eventually, weary of the sameness of life, he journeys to the mountainous Calf Island to regain his mortality. There he meets other immortals obsessed with their own stasis and sets out to scale the island's peak, from which the mysterious...

Poems consider the past, parenthood, mortality, success, misunderstanding, sleep, love, and travel.

In the fall of 1974 Robert E. Kleasen invited two young missionaries to his house in Austin, Texas, for deer steaks. Though apprehensive, they felt compelled to go. They should have bolted. Though convicted of homicide, Kleason would later be released from death row on a technicality. Upon hearing of the murders, then-LDS president Spencer W. Kimball was so disturbed that a physician had to be summoned to his home.

"2020 saw a spike in deaths in America, smaller than you might imagine during a pandemic, some of which could be attributed to COVID and to initial treatment strategies that were not effective. But then, in 2021, the stats people expected went off the rails. The CEO of the OneAmerica insurance company publicly disclosed that during the third and fourth quarters of 2021, death in people of working age (18-64) was 40 percent higher than it was before...

Afghanistan today has the second highest maternal and infant mortality rates in the world. Filmmaker Sedika Mojadidi reveals the extent of this tragedy by documenting the 2003 return to Afghanistan of her father, Dr. Qudrat Mojadidi (an OB/GYN who emigrated to the U.S. in 1972) as he attempts to rehabilitate Kabul's Rabia Balkhi Hospital with the promised support of the U.S. Dept. of Health and Human Services. The film focuses on Dr. Mojadidi's emergency...