Chapter 14

Two years and four months after I found my own obituary, I stood at a podium in a hotel ballroom in Portland and looked out at six hundred toxicologists, medical examiners, and forensic nurses. They'd asked me to give the keynote at the national conference. I'd said no twice. The third time, the program chair — a woman my age with an unreasonable amount of patience — said, "Nora. Half the people in that room have signed off on a death you would have caught." So I said yes. My mother was...