Norwich — For providers of hospice care, compassion comes easy. It’s the business part that’s sometimes hard.

Few would know that better than Carol Mahier, whose 32-year career with the Center for Hospice Care closely parallels the nonprofit organization’s evolution from a coalition of southeastern Connecticut home care agencies to a regional program whose recent affiliation with Hartford HealthCare has extended its service area to the Massachusetts border.

With that accomplished, Mahier, the hospice center’s president and chief executive officer, announced earlier this month that she will retire Friday.

“You do what you need to do until your job has come full circle,” Mahier said this past week during an interview at the center’s Dunham Street offices. “The merger with Hartford HealthCare is a wonderful opportunity to solidify our presence in the community and grow with another health care provider.”

“It’s a strong partnership,” she said, the kind the center had been seeking for more than a decade.

The center's forerunner, Hospice Southeastern Connecticut, which linked a dozen home care agencies and Lawrence + Memorial Hospital in New London, was scarcely two years old when Mahier was hired as its nurse coordinator in 1987. At that point, she’d been a registered nurse for 20 years. Born and bred in Baltimore, where she earned her bachelor’s degree in nursing from the University of Maryland, she also had a master’s degree from the University of Virginia.

Soon enough, she recalled, she suggested the hospice seek Medicare certification.

“I’m a purist when it comes to hospice,” Mahier said. “Either you do it well or you don’t do it.”

In 1989, the hospice program gained its certification and state licensure, moved into a new office in New London and expanded its staff. Several years later, it would add an affiliation with The William W. Backus Hospital and a Norwich location before moving to Gallivan Lane in Uncasville, its home for more than 11 years.

Sts. Peter & Paul Church in Norwich donated the land where Hospice Southeastern Connecticut built its current offices, including a bereavement center, which opened in 2008. From there, it deploys a staff that includes a medical director, primary care physicians, nurses, social workers, a chaplain and more than 110 trained volunteers who minister to the needs of the terminally ill and their families, visiting them in their homes, nursing homes and hospital rooms.

It changed its name to Center for Hospice Care in 2013.

In Mahier’s 32 years with hospice, the center has seen some 12,500 patients and their families. In 2017-18, it cared for 579 patients and their families while its bereavement teams provided support and guidance to nearly 1,100 bereaved family members, according to an annual report.

Mahier, a Clinton resident, said the public’s awareness of hospice, or end-of-life care, has grown over the years, certainly since Connecticut Hospice in Branford, the first U.S. hospice, opened in 1972.

“Now, there’s more honesty,” she said. “People should see life as a glass half full, even at the end … without pain, anxiety or sleeplessness, all of which can be alleviated. And your family can be supported, too.”

She recalled the case of a bedridden hospice patient who craved a visit to Dairy Queen. The center, along with American Ambulance, its "Sentimental Journeys" partner, made it happen.

Mahier said recent studies of terminally ill patients of similar characteristics show those in hospice care live an average of 29 days longer than patients who undergo treatments aimed at curing their illness.

“You can live well until you die,” she said. “Hospice can help.”

b.hallenbeck@theday.com