After turning forty and the unexpected death of her father, the narrator seeks to make sense of the story of her father's life and her own. Reflections on Buddhism, death, family history and community flow through the narrator's journey from the backcountry of the Colorado Rocky Mountains to the rolling farmland of the Midwest, from a retreat center in Oregon to the ancient geography of Wisconsin's Driftless Area. With clues gathered from her family home in Waterloo, Iowa, the narrator returns to her current home in Portland, where she comes to understand for herself the significance of the phrase "the let going."