PITTSFORD, N.Y. — Gravely ill with heart disease, tethered to an oxygen tank, her feet swollen and her appetite gone, Sister Dorothy Quinn, 87, readied herself to die in the nursing wing of the Sisters of St. Joseph convent where she has been a member since she was a teenager.
She was surrounded by friends and colleagues of nearly seven decades.
As she lay dying, Quinn declined most of her 23 medications not essential for her heart condition, prescribed by specialists but winnowed by a geriatrician who knows that elderly people are often overmedicated. She decided against a mammogram to learn the nature of a lump in her one remaining breast, understanding that she would not survive treatment.
There were goodbyes and decisions about giving away her quilting supplies and jigsaw puzzle collection. She consoled her biological sister.
Even as her prognosis gradually improved from hours to weeks and even months, Quinn's goal was not immortality; it was getting back to quilting, as she now has.
“I'm not afraid of death,” she said. “Even when I was dying, I wasn't afraid of it. You just get a feeling within yourself at a certain point. You know when to let it be.”
A convent is a world apart. But the Sisters of St. Joseph, a congregation in this Rochester suburb, animate many factors that studies say contribute to successful aging and a gentle death. These include a large social network, intellectual stimulation, continued engagement in life and spiritual beliefs, as well as health care guided by the less-is-more principles of palliative and hospice care — trends that are moving from the fringes to the mainstream.
For the elderly and infirm Roman Catholic sisters here, all of this takes place in a Mother House designed like a secular retirement community for a congregation that is literally dying off, like so many religious orders. On average, one sister dies each month, right here, not in the hospital, because few choose aggressive medical intervention at the end of life.
“We approach our living and our dying in the same way, with discernment,” said Sister Mary Lou Mitchell, the congregation president. “Maybe this is one of the messages we can send to society, by modeling it.”
Said Mary Lou Mitchell, 56, a former nurse, “There is a time to die and a way to do that with reverence. Hospitals should not be meccas for dying. Dying belongs at home, in the community. We built this place with that in mind.”
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