This documentary looks at how modern medicine deals with the frail, the elderly and the dying, contrasting three communities to explore how medicine might be used in the last stage of life. It tells the stories of Harold Chinlund, an 82-year-old fighting pneumonia and pancreatic cancer in Sun City, Arizona, America's oldest retirement community; Bernadette Mannion of Clifden, Ireland, struggling to care for her 94-year-old mother; and Mata Shukla, a 94-year-old woman whose children have taken her to a hostel in Benares, India, to die.