A leukemia patient attempts to end a 20-year feud with her sister to get her bone marrow.
The lives of several individuals intertwine as they go about their lives in their own unique ways, engaging in acts which society as a whole might find disturbing in a desperate search for human connection.
A woman wakes up next to her dead husband. She refuses the fact that he is dead and pretends to her family that he's still alive.
The Baker brood moves to Chicago after patriarch Tom gets a job coaching football at Northwestern University, forcing his writer wife, Mary, and the couple's 12 children to make a major adjustment. The transition works well until work demands pull the parents away from home, leaving the kids bored - and increasingly mischievous.
While visiting her sister in Paris, a young woman finds romance and learns her brother-in-law is a philanderer.
On a desolate country highway, two homeward-bound teens are nearly run off the road by a maniac in a beat-up truck, and later spot him shoving what appears to be a body down a sewer pipe.
Violinist Sydney Wells was accidentally blinded by her sister Helen when she was five years old. She submits to a cornea transplantation, and while recovering from the operation, she realizes that she is seeing dead people.
A father who is uncomfortable with the state of his family as he is craving perfection from them.
Dinithi tries very hard to communicate with her husband, but he ignores her presence relentlessly. The harder she tries to reach him, the deeper his silence becomes. Their 8 year old daughter watches them. Her parents try to get involved but receive the same silent treatment from him.
With their father away as a chaplain in the Civil War, Jo, Meg, Beth and Amy grow up with their mother in somewhat reduced circumstances. They are a close family who inevitably have their squabbles and tragedies. But the bond holds even when, later, male friends start to become a part of the household.