Pam Panchak, Post-Gazette Jefferson Award winner Nancy Gannon is a hospice volunteer. "I am a better person for sitting quietly at the bed of a dying patient." Click photo for larger image. Related coverage Seven honored for outstanding service to others Coming tomorrow Dominick Jones-Moriarty and Warren Butler

This is how Nancy Gannon comforts the dying.

She plays student to a philosophy professor by reading and discussing a book titled "Enneagrams" on personality types.

She cradles a sick baby boy in her arms so his parents can tend to their other children.

She plants a garden for a critically ill woman who supervises from the window and tells her she is doing it all wrong.

It all sounds so overwhelming. And indeed, when Mrs. Gannon was approached more than 20 years ago to be a volunteer for Family Hospice and Palliative Care in Mt. Lebanon after her own mother died, she said no thanks.

"Who wants to be around dying people?" she thought. "It's depressing."

But Mrs. Gannon said she has learned more about life than death from all her visits inside the homes of the terminally ill. "At the end of life, you have more to offer. You have wisdom."

For her 20 years of volunteering on behalf of Family Hospice, Mrs. Gannon is one of seven community advocates chosen to receive a 2006 Jefferson Award for Public Service. At a dinner Jan. 25 honoring the awardees, Macy's will present Mrs. Gannon with $1,000 to give to Family Hospice.

One evening last month, Mrs. Gannon changed out of pajamas to sit all night with a nursing home patient who would have otherwise been dying alone. She came back at 4 a.m., only to host a hospice fund-raiser the next day in her Mt. Lebanon living room.

"She is a legend," said Baylee Gordon, now retired executive director of Family Hospice, a job she held from 1987-1997. "She is the kind of person most of us aspire to be."

But she is no holier-than-thou Pollyanna. "You think she is a saint, but she is an earth mother" with an irreverent sense of humor, Mrs. Gordon said.

Mrs. Gannon says her irreverence comes out in inopportune moments. "My husband is usually tapping my knee as if to say, 'Slow it down a little.' "

A 69-year-old with brown wavy hair, she is the lively Catholic matriarch of six children and 13 grandchildren who is constantly inviting her brood over for big noisy family dinners.

This past holiday, she was busy buying dozens of gifts for her family and doing her Christmas decorating. "Everyone my age is buying a stupid artificial tree," she quipped before showing a visitor her real one. "I am not ready to do that yet."

She balanced the bustle of Christmas with hospice work. Instead of trimming the tree with her husband as planned, she visited a woman who was alone in a nursing home, as part of hospice's CandleLight Companion program.

"It grounds me," she says of her visits to the dying.

The fact that she is not self-conscious makes her such a good volunteer, said Rafael Sciullo, president of Family Hospice and Palliative Care.

"It takes a lot of energy to sit with a dying patient," Mr. Sciullo said. "You need someone who can rise above their own needs. Nancy makes patients feel like they are the only thing she has to do."

There is no instruction manual on how to comfort someone staring down death or how to prepare a widow-to-be.

"It is not intuitive," said Mrs. Gannon. She laughs with some patients, cries with others. Sometimes, when uncertainty grips her and she is not sure what to say, she gulps a breath of air.

She follows the patient's lead. She applied makeup and brushed the hair of a mother whose adult sons couldn't bear to see her dying.

She laughs as she recalls how she planted flowers for an ailing gardener. Watching from the window, the woman told her she was doing it all wrong and to dig deeper.

"Can you picture this? You are dying and you know you are dying. And in the middle of dying, you say, 'I think we should plant a garden.' And then you tell the volunteer, 'You aren't doing it right,' " said Mrs. Gannon, doubling up with hearty peals of laughter. "I loved her feisty spirit. I just loved it."

The philosophy professor was another favorite. When she agreed to read the book called "Enneagrams" and discuss a few chapters every week, the professor beamed. "He has a student," his wife said.

"No written exams," Mrs. Gannon told the professor.

In the early 1990s, Mrs. Gannon became one of the first volunteers at Family Hospice to help a dying baby. She wells up with tears as she remembers Baby Charlie, who was born so severely deformed that he could not see or hear. Mr. Sciullo said parents of a dying baby often don't want to leave the infant's side, and it was a tribute to Mrs. Gannon that they trusted her to rock the baby.

Sometimes a terminally ill patient tells Mrs. Gannon painful thoughts they can't bear to tell relatives. Tom Trebilcock, 73 of Rosslyn Farms, said when his mother, Ruth, died of cancer in 1988, "she put up a good front for everybody, but Nancy was very comforting for her. She talked about things the rest of us didn't know about it. She looked forward to Nancy coming."

The one patient Mrs. Gannon did not reach was a woman in her 20s who was dying of AIDs. The woman was seething at her parents and would tell Mrs. Gannon to go home. "I don't want you here," she would tell Mrs. Gannon.

"Guess what?" Mrs. Gannon responded one day. "I probably could find a lot of other things to do. If you don't want to talk to me, why don't I clean up the place and do the dishes?"

"Suit yourself," the woman responded.

More often, she connects to patients or the caregivers. When new widows complain that all their friends are telling them to get on with their lives, she tells them, "Don't listen to your friends.

"The person who was married 42 years is not going to get on with their lives. Their lives just crashed. People don't know what to say, so they say the wrong thing. They don't mean to be hurtful."

Mrs. Gannon gets something back from each patient. She quit smoking 21 years ago after watching a woman die from lung cancer.

She prefers visiting terminally ill patients to raising money. But she has agreed to co-chair the $4 million capital campaign for a new Center for Compassionate Care, which will house a 12-bed impatient hospice facility and administrative offices. The education/training center will offer programs on end-of-life issues, and there will be grief support groups and caregiver support groups. Mrs. Gannon doesn't mind fund-raising for a cause she believes in -- dying with dignity, surrounded by loved ones, instead of in a sterile hospital room.

As if her hospice work weren't enough, Mrs. Gannon is also on the board of Achieva, a nonprofit that helps people with developmental disabilities. She is inspired by her daughter, Erin, who has Down syndrome and recently moved out on her own to a group home.

"She just rolls up her sleeves and just does and does and does," said Marsha Blanco, president and CEO of Achieva. "Her life as an activist is unbelievable."

In fact, Mrs. Gannon is so active in causes that her soft-spoken husband, a retired doctor named Robert, jokes how their roles have changed.

"She used to be known as my wife. Now I am known as her husband."

Mrs. Gannon said she can't imagine her life without visiting people on their deathbeds.

"I am a better person for sitting quietly at the bed of a dying patient. Just because it is quiet and you are thinking, 'This is where we are all going to end.' "