By the time Maria Francis started looking for a home for herself and her husband, she was virtually immune to the idea of challenge. Ten years of emotional churn and crisis management had taken care of that.
Mrs. Francis once assumed that the couple was permanently based in Central Florida, where her husband, Mike Francis, was a senior pastor at a Presbyterian church. But that was before Memorial Day in 2015, when he suffered a heart attack while biking along a country road. Mr Francis underwent a grueling rehabilitation, but the lack of oxygen during the incident left him with severe memory loss – a constant presence in the couple’s lives since.
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“Everything has changed. Everything,” said Ms. Francis, 62. “Mike is ambulatory and he can take care of himself in basic ways, but he’s not going to work anymore.”
With the help of friends, family and the church community, Mrs. Francis remained active in Florida for another five years, serving as a caregiver and working at a local college. In 2020, she decided to move them across the country to Berkeley, California, where the couple had met and married in the 1980s, to be near one of their daughters and other family members.
Mrs. Francis took a church administrative job in Berkeley and found an inexpensive place to live for the couple in a converted convent in nearby El Cerrito. In 2024, they moved into a rental property offered by an elderly couple at church, but within a year the owners informed them they were selling the property.
That’s when Ms. Francis made what she called a stunning discovery: An investment account, created by friends in the months after Mr. Francis’ heart attack, had posted huge market gains over the years. Together with some savings and an inheritance from Mrs. Francis’ mother, they had enough money to buy a house in Berkeley.
“I don’t even know all the people who contributed to that fund,” Ms. Francis said. “That’s why I call this a miracle. It was all because of their generosity.”
Delighted, she decided to make a one-time “last home” move – for her sake, but also for her husband, 63, who does not deal well with such changes. She enlisted the help of her niece, Sophia Johnson, an agent with Intero Real Estate in Cupertino, California.
Mrs. Johnson felt the responsibility deeply. “My aunt is a remarkable person – a professional at making lemonade from lemons,” she said. “No one deserved a win more than her.”
They started with a budget of about $1.6 million, with some wiggle room. Mrs. Francis hoped for an easily accessible home with lots of light, close to their church if possible, yet within walking distance of shops and restaurants. The sense of community was a plus. Mrs. Johnson warned her aunt to brace herself: Homes in Berkeley, already expensive, were generally priced too low to spark bidding wars.
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