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Robert Card displayed a textbook set of warning signs: He was hearing voices. He told people that he was planning violence. And his behavior had markedly changed in the months leading up to the mass shooting he carried out last week. His family, his superiors in the military and the local police knew all of this. Yet no one stopped him. His killing of 18 people with an assault-style rifle in Lewiston, Maine, points to how shortcomings in the mental health system, weak laws and a reluctance to threaten personal liberties can derail even concerted attempts to thwart violence in a country awash in guns. (Dewan, Bogel-Burroughs and Marcius, 11/2)

Managing diabetes is difficult enough with health insurance. Doing it without insurance can feel impossible. The disease—the nation’s costliest chronic condition and especially prevalent among the poorest Americans—demands daily care and resources to keep it under control. Left untreated, it mushrooms through the body’s blood vessels, damaging organs and limbs and leaving behind a trail of disability and premature death. (Krisberg and Levitan, 11/1)

Hundreds of residents and officials were on hand Thursday to celebrate the opening of Affinia Healthcare’s newest freestanding primary care clinic, a $7.5 million facility that boasts 23 medical exam rooms, services ranging from dental to behavioral health care, a unique midwifery program and a partnership with the adjacent Emerson YMCA. But it was the clinic’s majority-Black medical team — some who grew up in north St. Louis County, dreaming of one day caring for their neighbors — who stole the show. (Munz, 11/2)

Communities ravaged by America’s opioid epidemic are starting to get their share of a $50 billion pie from legal settlements. Most of that money comes with a requirement that it be used to address the overdose crisis and prevent more deaths. But how? It could mean that places look more like the area around Findlay. Here, conservative Hancock County has built a comprehensive system focused on both treatment and recovery by adding housing, a needle exchange, outreach workers and a community center. (Mulvihill and Johnson, 11/3)

Esther Beukema planned her funeral the way she planned her life: with precision and resolve. She had been hoping for death since adolescence, and now that it was coming, she wanted every detail to be perfect. She chose the music — Adele’s “Easy on Me,” “Bring Me to the Water” by Marco Borsato and Matt Simons, a piano score from Yann Tiersen — and visited the crematorium not far from where she grew up in Soest, about an hour southeast of Amsterdam. Instead of a coffin, she wanted to lie in a wicker basket, so she and her parents picked one out. She assembled a “memory box” filled with cards and mementos for her loved ones. Friends wrote notes on paper butterflies, which Esther read. Her mother, Ellen Beukema, later pinned them to the basket. (Ellin, 11/1)

Tracey Silver-Charan didn’t suspect her new uniform was at fault when she began feeling “violently sick” at work in 2016. A flight attendant for 37 years, she had been through several uniform changes by the time American Airlines introduced new workwear for all its employees in September of that year. But soon she notified her supervisors she was suffering persistent health problems on the job. Whenever she came home from a trip, she’d start to feel better. “I was having severe respiratory distress,” Silver-Charan, a 61-year-old based in Los Angeles, told The Washington Post. “I couldn’t even breathe. And my voice would go hoarse. I would feel like I was going to faint. I got some rashes.” (Andrade, 11/2)