Sometimes we don’t want to say what’s going on because putting it into words would make it real. At other times, words don’t seem to capture the weight of what we want to say.

Contributor Samuel James thought he knew what happened to his mother. But he was wrong.

A beloved drawing goes missing from Mr. Ablao’s third grade classroom.

Chaunte Vaughn’s mother recently died of Parkinsons. Even though Chaunte doesn't believe in ghosts, she is visited by her mom's ghost multiple times.

Amy Bloom tells the story of her husband, Brian, getting Alzheimer's and wanting assisted suicide. Her search to find a way to do that led her to Dignitas, in Switzerland.

Producer Aviva DeKornfeld tells the story of Bill Edgar, who accidentally ended up helping people have a say at a moment when most people don’t get to say anything at all.

Comedian Casey Wilson’s mom was a stabilizing force in her family. So after her unexpected death, both Casey and her father felt devastated and unmoored.

Vauhini Vara lost her sister when she was in college. Even though Vauhini’s a writer now, she’d never really been able to write about her sister.

Senior editor David Kestenbaum helps his kids set up an ant farm. They follow all the instructions, to the letter! But he ends up learning a lesson he’s pretty sure the manufacturer did not intend.

Ira talks with comedian Rob Delany, who suffered the worst kind of loss a parent can endure — the death of his two-year-old son, Henry. Rob describes what his grief has been like and what he’s learned from it.

Producer Lina Misitzis travels to Greece with her family to exhume the bones of her dead grandmother. (20 minutes)

Eleven adult siblings need to divide their dead parents' stuff. But they don’t all get along.

We begin with a woman whose sister has died. She has questions.

When a pet dies, to what degree can it be replaced by another? And to what degree can pets replace people in our lives? David Sedaris tells this story of cats and dogs and other animals.

There is a four mile long bridge in Naan-jing China, famous for how many people jump off to die by suicide. In 2003, a man named Chen Sah began spending all of his weekends on the bridge, trying to single handedly stop the jumpers.

Producer Miki Meek tells the story of a phone booth in Japan that attracts thousands of people who lost loved ones in the 2011 tsunami and earthquake. A Japanese TV crew from NHK Sendai filmed people inside the phone booth, whose phone is not connected to anything at all.

Nema and Neda Semnani have extraordinarily similar first names – and completely opposite ways of dealing with what happened to their dad when they were little.