By the time Maria Francis began searching for a home for herself and her husband, she was practically immune to the notion of challenge. A decade of emotional churn and crisis management had seen to that.
Ms. Francis once assumed that the couple were permanently settled in Central Florida, where her husband, Mike Francis, was the senior pastor at a Presbyterian church. But that was before Memorial Day in 2015, when he had a heart attack while biking along a country road. Mr. Francis endured a grueling rehabilitation, but the oxygen deprivation during the incident had left him with severe amnesia — a constant presence in the couple’s life ever since.
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“Everything changed. Everything,” said Ms. Francis, 62. “Mike is ambulatory, and he can take care of himself in basic ways, but he is not going to work again.”
With the help of friends, family and the church community, Ms. Francis soldiered on in Florida for five more years, acting as a caregiver and working at a local college. In 2020, she decided to move them across the country to Berkeley, Calif., where the couple had met and married in the 1980s, to be near one of their daughters and other family members.
Ms. Francis took a church administrative job in Berkeley and found an inexpensive living space for the couple at a converted convent in nearby El Cerrito. In 2024, they moved into a rental offered by an elderly couple in the church, but within a year, the owners informed them that they were going to sell 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’s heart attack, had made huge market gains through the years. Together with some savings and an inheritance from Ms. Francis’s mother, they had enough money to buy a home 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.”
Elated, she resolved to make a one-time, “last house” move — for her sake, but also for her husband, 63, who does not handle such changes well. She enlisted the help of her niece, Sophia Johnson, an agent with Intero Real Estate in Cupertino, Calif.
Ms. Johnson felt the responsibility deeply. “My aunt is a remarkable person — a professional at making lemonade out of lemons,” she said. “Nobody deserved a win more than they did.”
They began with a budget of about $1.6 million, with some wiggle room. Ms. Francis hoped for an easily accessible home with lots of light, near their church if possible but walkable to shops and restaurants regardless. A sense of community was a plus. Ms. Johnson warned her aunt to brace herself: Berkeley homes, already expensive, were generally underpriced in order to spark bidding wars.
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