A Graced Traveler in a Foreign Land follows thirty-four-year-old Fiona, pregnant with a child she does not want, as she returns home to help care for her dying grandfather. The women of the family care for him the best way they know how: Fiona’s grandmother makes a secret pact to help him die (she keeps a vial of morphine in the pocket of her housecoat for when he utters their code word); Fiona’s mother resorts to New Age affirmations, old-fashioned Catholic guilt, and increasingly desperate medical interventions to keep him alive at all costs; and Fiona tries to chase down her uncle, the youngest of her grandparents’ children, whom no one has seen in years. But when death finally comes for this family, it is not the death they have been expecting and Fiona must learn to reconcile two very different kinds of grief – one for the living and one for the dead.