Chain of Title Read Free

in March; surgery had been scheduled for April. And Lisa could think of practically nothing else, ministering to Jenna at nearly every waking moment. As a cancer nurse, she worked with families coping with the stress of a sickchild. Now she was experiencing the same emotions: consumed by the same yearning to keep her daughter comfortable, and at stray moments wondering how this beautiful creature could be marked for affliction.
    Lisa was forty-three, a nurse, a wife, and a new mother. She had only lived in the house two years. And her life was about to change forever.
    KNOCK KNOCK KNOCK!
    She did not hesitate for a second. “That’s about the house, Alan!” she yelled out to her husband. “They’re from the bank, and it’s not good news!”
    Lisa Epstein dreamed of following her father, a pediatrician, into medicine. After earning a nursing degree from George Mason University in 1988, she bounced around the mid-Atlantic from one job to the next: the pediatric intensive care unit at D.C. Children’s Hospital; an OR in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware; an endocrinology unit at the National Institutes of Health. Soon she started her own business as a freelancer in Columbia, Maryland, working with terminally ill patients in home care, while filling in for nurses across the Washington Beltway.
    Lisa chose to enter an area of nursing that involved long-term, one-on-one collaboration with people who were at the end of their lives and often aware of their own mortality. There were daily duties, techniques to make patients comfortable and free of pain. And she loved the perpetual motion of the job, marking her ability in the eyes of her patients. But to Lisa, the real appeal was the challenge of being the last new person these terminally ill people would ever connect with, a confidant amid an atmosphere of grieving. Lisa would make her patients laugh, hear their stories, pray with them, cry with them, and give them strength when needed. Building intimacy and trust helped keep people alive, too.
    Part of the job involved knowing when and how to tell patients, “It may be time for you to videotape yourself reading bedtime stories to your grandchild. I’m not saying you won’t be there to read to them, but with this new information from your scan, it would be nice for your family to have that.” Even doctors flinched at such naked honesty. Everyone in the medical system, on both sides of the desk, clings to the faintest possibility of recovery. If treatments A, B, C, D, E, F, and G don’t work, let’s try treatment H. But someone has to stress the importance of organizing thoughts, of compensatingloved ones with the word “goodbye.” In those darkest moments of loss and depression, the truth can be an odd comfort. It took as much skill as knowing how to connect an IV or read an EKG.
    Over nine years in the D.C. area, Lisa built her freelance nursing business, helping patients balance hopes of recovery with the realities of the life cycle. She had lived in the region since early childhood, and while she wasn’t too interested in politics, she grew accustomed to the dynamic, politically charged environment. Plus D.C. had another side: a storehouse of experts with accumulated wisdom on virtually every topic. Whenever she found herself in the District, Lisa would find a lecture on something she knew nothing about. Away from the stress of caretaking, it was nice to decompress and enter an unknown world.
    But these were also restless years for Lisa. Every fall, when the leaves changed color and the clouds rolled in, she would feel a powerful rush of sadness, bursting into tears for no reason. These days they call it seasonal affective disorder, but Lisa never gave it a name. She just recognized the need for a change of scenery. So in 1997 Lisa decided to head to Florida for the winter. The state had three renewable resources: alligators, palmetto bugs, and the elderly, and the last