This article is a collaboration between The New Yorker and ProPublica. “You’re looking for uneducated people, if you will, because you’re able to provide something to them and meet a need.”
“We’d find run-down places where people were more on the poverty line,” she told me.
She sent colleagues to cadge rides on the Meals on Wheels van or to chat up veterans at the American Legion bar. She canvassed birthday parties at housing projects and went door to door promoting the program to loggers and textile workers. But at AseraCare, a national chain where Farmer worked, she solicited recruits regardless of whether they were near death. To qualify, patients must agree to forgo curative care and be certified by doctors as having less than six months to live. Other times, she’d scan church prayer lists for the names of families with ailing members.įarmer was selling hospice, which, strictly speaking, is for the dying. Some days, she’d ride the one-car ferry across the river to Lower Peach Tree and other secluded hamlets where a few houses lacked running water and bare soil was visible beneath the floorboards. As she drove the back roads of rural Alabama, she kept an eye out for dilapidated homes and trailers with wheelchair ramps. Over the years, Marsha Farmer had learned what to look for.
