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"The word “opportunity” comes up often in conversations with Chris Buttress.

She talks about how important it was to her parents she had an opportunity to get more of an education than they did. Both sets of her grandparents came to America from Lebanon. Her parents were the first in their families to be born in this country. Both were their respective high school valedictorians. But that’s as far as they could go.

They wanted more for their daughter.

Their prompting took hold. Growing up in small-town Cambridge, Ohio, Chris didn’t have to be told to take school seriously. She was in grade school when she decided she would be an attorney. Her exposure to the law at the time was limited to Raymond Burr’s portrayals of Perry Mason, although she didn’t imagine herself being involved in any facet of criminal law. She was drawn more by a sense that, as a lawyer, she would be in a position to help people solve problems and find order in their lives.

She was 15 when her father died. He had been ailing, but it hadn’t occurred to her he might die. A few days before a procedure he would not survive, he called her aside:

“Suddenly, I’m hearing him say, ‘I may or may not be here after the surgery.’ He was telling me how important it was to him that I really try to get along with my mother and be supportive – she and I are so much alike, we frequently clashed.

I came out of that conversation with a lot to think about. That conversation made me grow up. It also made me appreciate the time I’d had with my father to that point and how important he was to me. I realized that if I didn’t go forward and do the best I could, be the best person I could be, I would have been failing my father.

“That conversation is the most defining moment of my life. I came away from it with an awareness that every disappointment can be an opportunity to do something positive.”

That exchange would factor into Chris’ eventual decision to focus her career on estate planning and estate administration – in plain terms, helping people put their affairs in order. She suggests it was a factor in her decision, too, to accept an invitation to become a member of the board of directors of Starshine, the hospice for Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center.

She has come to see an awareness of death and dying – and the conviction, it’s something we’re all obliged to prepare for – as a thread that runs through her life and gives her purpose.

“My goal is to make the transition a smoother one for my clients – and to find ways to facilitate philanthropy and make their dollars work harder,” she says.

“The question I continually seek to answer is, how do you take something that is inevitable and use it as an opportunity to find positive outcomes?"