Douglas Reingold, loving husband, father to teenagers, and an engineer by trade, has a close call riding his motorcycle one day. He's struck by a tortured thought: how would his wife and children's lives go on if he were dead? Obsessed with the answer to this question, he persuades the showrunner of a reality TV show called Do Us Part, devoted to documenting stories of terminal illness, to stage his dying. He is propelled into a world of intrusive producers, documentary intrusiveness and layers of lies and watches the ways his family, colleagues, neighbors, and friends begin to adjust in surprising ways to the idea of his absence. Will he actually go through with it? Even Douglas is not sure as he grows ever sicker.