To Alice

Is caring too much a bad thing?

Alice Hammond is a troubled soul. She dropped out of medical school when one of her professors made it too stressful for her to stay. Now she works as a home health and hospice aide in Providence, Vermont. She is a wonderful aide, the quality of her work is high, and her patients love her. But Alice tends to become too involved with them. She has made their lives her life—a problem both for them and herself.

The boundaries between providing compassionate care and getting too involved are already blurred, when one of her patients leaves her all his property and $125,000 and leaves his brother, who cared for him for nearly five years, nothing.
Alice is faced with more than just trying to make sense of her life and getting over the terrible experience in medical school. She must contend with her patient’s brother—and he is furious.

"To Alice by J. Peter Cobb is a compelling, compassionate, humorous and oh so human story of the amazing caregivers that work in our towns everyday. The author's detailed knowledge and respect of those in need of care and those doing the care through home health services creates a cast of characters true to life. Most of us will end up in these professional hands and we can be grateful for this eloquent and complex story of the burdens and blessings of caring so well."
—Virginia Lynn Fry, author of Part of Me Died Too--Stories of Creative Survival among Bereaved Children and Teenagers