Heather Meyerend is a hospice nurse who works in several neighborhoods in South Brooklyn—Sheepshead Bay, Mill Basin, Marine Park, Bensonhurst, Bay Ridge. She usually has between sixteen and twenty patients, and visits each at home once a week, sometimes more. Some patients die within days of her meeting them, but others she gets to know well, over many months. She sees her work as preparing a patient for the voyage he is about to take, and accompanying him partway down the road. She, like most hospice workers, feels that it is a privilege to spend time with the dying, to be allowed into a person’s life and a family’s life when they are at their rawest and most vulnerable, and when they most need help. Some hospice workers believe that working with the dying is the closest you can get on earth to the presence of God.

Heather is not brisk or efficient, as nurses in hospitals are. She is purposely inefficient, in fact. Most of the time when she visits patients, she doesn’t have much to do: she takes vital signs, she checks that there are enough supplies and medications in the house, she asks if old symptoms have gone away or new ones developed. If she were rushing, she could do all that in about five minutes, but her visits usually last an hour or more. Sometimes there is a complicated medical situation to take care of. Sometimes she does something non-medical that needs to be done, which is the hospice way—she might sweep a floor, she might heat up dinner. But, even when there’s nothing else to do, the idea is to be around longer, to chat, to sit close by, to put her hands on the patient’s skin as she goes about her checkup. Her visit may be the high point of the day for the patient, who may not be able to get out of bed, or for whoever is taking care of the patient, who may not have left the house or seen anybody else for a day or two; either or both of them may be going a little crazy and may badly need interruption or variety of any kind, ideally someone different to talk to. So Heather moves slowly; she sits down; she delays; she lingers.

Dying can be long and bewildering, lonely and painful, frequently undignified, and consumed by pressing and unpredictable and constantly changing and multiplying needs. It’s a relief to have someone around who understands what’s going on and what may happen next. On the other hand, when dying is long it becomes ordinary, just another kind of living, but one in which your friends may be gone and your children busy, or not busy enough. In that case, it can be a good thing to see someone who is not a member of your family; who comes from the world outside your illness; who has known you long enough to be familiar but not long enough to have heard your stories already; who wants to know where your pain is but doesn’t need you to explain everything; and who is there to take your vital signs but who behaves as though she might have come over to borrow a snow shovel or a couple of eggs.

Hospice used to have a countercultural air about it: dying at home seemed, for a while, as unconventional as giving birth at home. The first modern hospice was founded in 1967, in London, by Cicely Saunders, who was both a doctor and a social worker: she wanted to offer homelike care that aimed to provide comfort and serenity rather than to prolong life. Two years later, Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s book “On Death and Dying” focussed public attention on the idea of the “good death.” The first American hospice opened in 1974. In those days, hospices were small nonprofits staffed mostly by volunteers; but in the mid-nineteen-eighties Medicare began to cover hospice, and now roughly twice as many people in America die in hospice as die in hospital. Oddly, Medicare still requires that volunteers provide five per cent of a hospice’s staff hours, even though some hospices now are large businesses that are very profitable indeed. (MJHS, where Heather works, is a not-for-profit.)

Hospice believes in caring not only for the patient but also for the family, and tries to address psychological and spiritual needs as well as physical ones, providing social workers and bereavement counsellors, music therapists and chaplains, who work together as a team and consult one another frequently. Nonetheless, patients tend to resist hospice, because it sounds like a death sentence, and it is: entering hospice means giving up on curative treatments, and you qualify only if your doctor believes that you have less than six months to live.

Carmela’s house stood on a quiet street in Bergen Beach, across Mill Basin from Floyd Bennett Field. Her front door opened onto a small hallway, to the left of which was a darkened living room, furnished with carved, gilded chairs and paintings of Jesus. Her husband built the house in 1972, but he died some time ago, and now Carmela lived there by herself. That morning, she had pulled her hair back in a white satin headband, and she was wearing a baby-blue fleece bathrobe and bedroom slippers. She led Heather past a large cage with two small birds hopping about in it, into the kitchen.

“I get dizzy,” she said. “I don’t know if it’s because of my pressure.”

“But your pressure has been O.K.,” Heather said. She put her bag down on the kitchen floor and sat at the table. “What time do you get dizzy? Before or after your medication?”

“Before.”

“O.K., so it isn’t that.”

“I’m always diagnosing myself,” Carmela told her. “I missed my calling. I wanted to be a nurse, but my mother said no.”

“And those were the days when you did what your mother told you.”

“Oh, yes. But I drew the line at the man she wanted for me.”

“Good idea!”

“Well, maybe he would’ve been better than the one I picked. Mine was crazy.”

Heather laughed. “But he built you this beautiful house.”

“Yeah, and he was a plumber, he did all the pipes.”

Carmela’s parents came to Brooklyn from Sicily in the nineteen-twenties and opened a candy store on Henry Street in Carroll Gardens. At some point, they moved to Bergen Beach and opened a boarding house. They rented rooms to performers who worked in the amusement park in Coney Island. Back then, there was nothing around, Carmela said—only the big house surrounded by grass with the beach behind. All the roads were still dirt. Outside the house was a field of weeds, twelve feet high.

“My mother was very shrewd,” Carmela told Heather. “Every bit of money she got, she bought bits of property. Her English was bad, but she had a good head on her shoulders. A property guy would come by the house and ask, ‘How much do you want for a property?’ ‘Two thousand.’ ‘That’s too much.’ ‘You don’t want it? Don’t buy it.’ Next day, he’d come back, ‘How much?’ ‘Twenty-five hundred. Tomorrow it’ll be three thousand.’ My mother always picked up every penny, and I still do. They were in candy, it was a penny business, so I have great respect for the penny.”