His sepsis would keep recurring. His system, likely colonized by bacteria acquired in health care institutions, was breaking down. Demented, contracted, hurting — he had no quality of life, doctors said, urging hospice.

But as the hospital’s own social workers had explained, hospice benefits from Medicare came with a catch: Her father would lose all Medicaid home care. In home hospice, that would leave huge gaps, unless she could tend to him around the clock. The alternative was hospice in a nursing home.

Not that, she vowed, vividly recalling her mother’s monthlong death in hospice at DeWitt, after a doctor said withholding liquids was “the humane way.” Once, arriving for her daily visit, she had unthinkingly carried in a cup of tea. Not quickly enough, she hid it behind a curtain, seeing her mother pass her tongue over parched lips.

“She was suffering, and I contributed to that,” she said, sobbing. “I will never forgive myself.”

For her father, she was determined to do better. She told the doctors she needed more time to consider home hospice, and wrestled with her inability to make the open-ended commitment. School administrators had long since lost patience with her absences, and all but accused her of using her parents’ health as an excuse to miss work. She had weeks to go until early retirement, and she had been postponing surgery to replace a hip injured in an icy fall.

The hospital finally proposed another option: Haven, a hospice inside Bellevue Hospital Center run by Visiting Nurse Service of New York. On Jan. 29, with her father unintelligible again, she reluctantly signed the papers.

The people who met them wore masks. Suddenly alert, her father grabbed her sleeve. “Don’t leave me here,” he said. “Something’s going to happen here. Why did you bring me to Bellevue?”

A hospice worker strapped him down, looking for a vein. As the painkiller reached his bloodstream, his daughter saw him gasp for life. She ran out in distress, asking for a priest.