Before there was hospice: The Hawthorn sisters

My mother used to sew incontinence pads for the local cancer home run by the Hawthorne sisters: soft cloth on the outside but layers of newspapers within. We now use blue pads of course, which is a godsend for people with incontinence and cheap and convenient. 

 The Cancer home was rum by a group of Dominican sisters in an order founded by the daughter of writer Hawthorne: So they are known as the Hawthorn Dominicans.

Plough Magazine has an article on their work.

in Hawthorne, New York, the Dominican congregation of St. Rose of Lima lives a quieter charism. The sisters nurse terminal cancer patients. Their community was founded in 1900 by Rose Hawthorne Lathrop (the daughter of Nathaniel Hawthorne). Lathrop converted to Catholicism and took the religious name Mother Mary Alphonsa. She began by caring for incurable cancer patients on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, and the congregation carries on that work today, outside the city.

,,,Sr. Stella Mary was nervous when she began working with patients, but older sisters gave her two pieces of advice. “Remember, you are first a religious.” She would be trained in basic medical care, but her first work would always be to pray and love the patients. Nursing was a way to express that love. The other piece of advice was more practical – all the patients are terminal. She wouldn’t be a surgeon whose smallest gesture could save a life or end it. Everyone came to the sisters to prepare to die, and hopefully to die well.