Twelve Breaths a Minute—the latest collaboration between SMU Press and the Creative Nonfiction Foundation, with the support of the Jewish Healthcare Foundation—features twenty-three original, compelling personal narratives that examine the way we as a society care for the dying. Here a poet, a former hospice worker, reflects on death’s mysteries; a son wanders the halls of his mother’s nursing home, lost in the small absurdities of the place; a grief counselor struggles with losing his own grandfather; a medical intern traces the origins of time and the quality of our final days; a mother anguishes over her decision to turn off her daughter’s life support and allow her organs to be harvested; and an emergency dispatcher tries to quantify what a stranger’s death should mean.