A champion for compassionate care

When Kathie Quinlan opened Isaiah House as a small hospice provider, her mission was to care for the poor, the overlooked and the scorned.

The year was 1987, and so that meant people dying of AIDS. Most other end-of-life options in Rochester declined to accept people with the disease, which was then killing people at an alarming rate.

Quinlan, who died earlier this month, made it known that Isaiah House would welcome them.

“Everybody was frightened,” says Debbie Sigrist, a hospice nurse, early Isaiah House volunteer and longtime friend of Quinlan’s. “It was a big issue even in the (hospitals). But Kathie was adamant. She just said, ‘We’re taking them, and that’s what we’re going to do.’”

The first was Tim Dunn. A former fashion model, he’d been wracked by the disease and arrived in mid-July 1989 with very little time left to live. For two weeks, his friends and admirers filled the little house with flowers and gifts. He died peacefully on July 30 with Quinlan and his family by his side.

“Isaiah House was a beautiful place because they weren’t prejudiced or fearful,” his sister, Marianne Bartlett, says. “They loved Tim as a person.”

Quinlan continued to call Dunn’s family members regularly for the next year. One of those siblings was inspired to work in hospice care as a result of that relationship.

“She was a gentle angel,” another of Dunn’s sisters, Kacey Sturtze, says. “A beautiful spirit walking on Earth.”

Quinlan, who helped hundreds of people in Rochester to meet death with dignity, died March 4 in hospice at the Highlands at Pittsford following a pair of recent strokes. She was 89.

Isaiah House, a two-bed comfort home providing hospice care, has been a final home to more than 600 dying people – many of them homeless or drug-addicted, for whom their dying bed was their softest resting place in years. The staff and volunteers have helped navigate and repair family relationships shredded by drug use, alcoholism, and homelessness.

She named it for the prophet Isaiah, and in particular his admonition: “Comfort,  comfort my people, says your God.”

Quinlan, whose second career as a hospice nurse arose from personal tragedy, turned that command into her life’s work.

“She just felt that to be a shepherdess to the dying was such an honor,” her daughter, Dorothy Sorbello, says. “She said it was the most life-giving thing she did.”

Kathie Mayrl was born March 3, 1937, the oldest of four siblings, and grew up on Parsells Avenue in Rochester.

She went to Catholic schools and graduated from Nazareth College in 1959. The day after Christmas of that year she married her husband, Bill. They remained together for 58 years until his death in 2018.

In the 1960s, Kathie and Bill watched helplessly as two of their infant children, Michael and Virginia, died of an incurable central nervous system disease. They did not know then, but later learned, that the cause was genetic. Later, she cared for her father through a difficult death from cancer.

The three wrenching experiences moved Quinlan to leave her first career as a speech-language pathologist and enter nursing school, specializing in caring for the dying.

“I think she saw how death didn’t have to be a bad or a negative thing,” Sorbello says. “You needed to be able to not leave anything left unsaid. You wanted to give your loved one comfort in their last days and help them achieve something wonderful.”

By the mid-1980s, Quinlan began thinking of opening her own home as a spiritual outreach of Corpus Christi Church. The pastor, James Callan, encouraged her to do so, and Isaiah House opened in a simple single-family house on Prince Street in 1987. It was the second comfort care home in Rochester, following Mount Carmel House.

“It was just so lovely there,” Sigrist says. “When you walked in that door, there was an energy and a peacefulness and a hospitality. And Kathie set the tone.”

Isaiah House is still open and recently moved from Prince Street to a new location on East Avenue.

A slight woman with an airy voice and whose hair went wispy white in her old age, Quinlan was often described as angelic. She called people “dear heart” and was quick to take their hand between hers during conversation, eyes fixed with empathy.

“She was a highly evolved soul,” Sigrist says. “She was just on a different plane.”

But her ethereal demeanor masked resolve; she was immovable when she detected matters of justice. She insisted on using the words ‘death’ and ‘dying,’ rather than resorting to euphemism.

“One thing is certain: our death will come,” she wrote in “Blessing Our Goodbyes,”a book she published in 2011. “However, for so very many people, death remains a forbidden topic. … Why is the word ‘die’ so very troubling to say, to hear and to think about?”

I first met Kathie Quinlan around 2012 at Rochester Friends Meeting, where she and I both worshipped. I believe we had a special relationship – but then, everyone’s relationship with her was special. I never saw her treat someone as anything other than a cherished friend, even if she only spoke with them once.

Several years after Kathie retired from Isaiah House, I began volunteering there once a week. On many shifts, both residents were asleep and I spent my two-hour shift shoveling snow or folding laundry.

Other times each minute was drenched in pathos, like oversaturated film.

One day I was there when the sun was barely up. One of the residents, an older Black woman who had spent much of her life on the street, eased down the stairs in her bathrobe and accepted a cup of coffee.

We sat in the stillness of the kitchen and watched the morning light climb the wall, sometimes exchanging a few words but otherwise sitting quietly as the mugs warmed our hands. It was the same way I might sit with my mother, or my wife; the way any two people might find themselves connected, even if briefly, through happenstance and grace.

Kathie wasn’t present for the scenes that for years have remained vivid in my mind, and yet I see her when I call the memories up. Such universal moments, made possible through the space that death often opens, were the essence of her work, and of her life.

“We have learned from our residents, and actually they’ve been the wisest of all,” she said in 2023. “They’re the wisest teachers of my whole life.”

Kathie Quinlan is survived by three siblings, three daughters and seven grandchildren, among others. Her calling hours will be from 4 to 8 p.m. Thursday, March 12, at Crawford Funeral Home, 495 N. Winton Road. A memorial service will take place at 11 a.m. the following day at Spiritus Christi Church, 121 N. Fitzhugh St., and will be livestreamed at www.spirituschristi.org.

Justin Murphy is a Rochester Beacon contributing writer. He is the research and communications coordinator for Our Local History and a former reporter for the Democrat and Chronicle.

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