At Schiavo's Hospice, a Return to Routine

Broderick is afraid of death. But he is even more "afraid that it will be a painful death, like suffocation," he whispers. He heard about Terri Schiavo and knows he should make out a living will, but he is overwhelmed by the legal issues.

"I would like them to keep me alive as best they can," he says at first. "But I don't want to be laying there in pain."

He hopes to make it to Christmas and would like to go to SeaWorld "for my last wish -- I like sharks, dolphins, whales."

A Weekly Ritual

Shortly after lunch, Woodside's senior staff -- all women, some knitting -- gather for their weekly meeting. It begins with a ritual -- the reading of the names of patients lost the previous week.

As the first is announced, Jean Ledoux, the chaplain, taps a chime and lights a votive candle. Each name comes with a story. The 91-year-old who hung on until his grandchildren arrived, the childless couple who after nearly 70 years of marriage seemed to need only each other.

For the past two months, Ledoux has been stuck in her own sort of netherworld, caught between her midlife calling to provide pastoral support to the dying and the public portrayal of Woodside as an unholy death chamber. Intellectually, she knows the "people out front were extremists," but she cannot reconcile how self-professed Christians -- many wearing robes -- could have been so "degrading, hurtful . . . misguided."

"This is sacred ground," she says.

Here Ledoux plays the jester, passing out pie, cracking jokes. But privately, she confesses she is seeing a trauma specialist, hoping to find some deeper meaning in The Siege. For some of her colleagues, it hit like a single, violent car crash. But for Ledoux, "it's more like a creeping-up-the-back-of-your-neck kind of feeling."

At Woodside, death does not end the process.

In the chapel, the Boulgier family is holding a memorial. And on Magnolia Avenue the Savianos have gathered outside Debra's room.

"I don't want her to see me crying," Corrine Saviano says. This is night six in Woodside for mother and daughter.

"She ain't gonna make it. Her organs are failing," Tom Saviano says. About an hour ago, the social worker delivered the news. "We don't know how long -- a day, two days, a week. We tried to give her every chance we could."