Diagnosed with incurable Alzheimer's Disease, Mel begs her husband to help end her life before she declines into "some sort of stinking, paranoid vegetable". For Maury, it brings the most wrenching crisis in their twenty-eight years together. But medically assisted suicide is deemed murder in Canada and no jurisdiction elsewhere accepts "euthanasia tourists". Bob, a recently blinded Texan oilman who also craves death, joins Maury and they fly to the South Pacific island nation of Nauru. They propose to set up an international assisted suicide centre in exchange for their promise to salvage the Nauruans' destroyed land - once the richest phosphate deposit in the world, now the world's most ecologically ravaged country. But religious fundamentalists of the U.S. mid-west and a corrupt Texan oil magnate with a hate for Bob declare the suicide centre a sin against the Bible and the American way of life. They vow to eradicate the centre and its builders.