 — ISIS beheadings, a multicar pileup, a family burnt in their beds during a house fire — I usually get to wondering whether that particular tragic end would be the worst way to go. The surprise, the pain, the fear of impending darkness.

But lately, I’ve been thinking that it’s the opposite question that begs to be asked: what’s the 

 way to die? Given hypothetical, anything-goes permission to choose from a creepy, unlimited vending machine of endings, what would you select?

If it helps, put yourself in that mindset that comes after a few glasses of wine with friends — your pal asks something dreamy, like where in the whole world you’d love to travel, or, if you could sleep with any celebrity, who would it be? Except this answer is even more personal.

There are lots of ways to look at the query. Would I want to know when I’m going to die, or be taken by surprise? (I mean, as surprising as such an inevitable event can be.) Would I want to be cognizant, so I can really experience dying as a process? Or might it be better to drowse my way through it?

three-quarters of Americans want to die at home

, though the reality is that most Americans, 

, will die in a hospital or other medicalized environment. Many also say they want to die in bed, but consider what that actually means: just lying there while your heart ticks away, your lungs heave to a stop. Lying around for too long also gets rather uncomfortable — as anyone who’s spent a lazy weekend in bed can tell you — and this raises a further question: should we expect comfort as we exit this life?

Sometimes I think getting sniped while walking down the street is the best way to go. Short, sweet, surprising; no worries, no time for pain. Sure, it’d be traumatic as hell for the people nearby, but who knows — your death might spark a social movement, a yearlong news story that launches media, legal, and criminal justice careers. What a death! It might mean something. Does that matter to you — that your death helps or otherwise changes other people’s lives? If there’s not a point to your death, you might wonder, was there a point to your life?

, ones — that don’t seem to come up very often.

I got curious about how other people would answer this question, so I started asking colleagues and friends for their ideal death scenarios (yes, I’m a blast at parties). I heard a wide variety of answers. Skydiving while high on heroin for the second time (because you want to have fun the first time, according to a colleague). Drowning, because he’d heard it was fairly peaceful once the panic clears. Storming a castle and felling enemies with a sword to save a woman, who he then has appreciative sex with, just as he’s taking his dying breaths. (That poor gal!) An ex-boyfriend of mine used to say that the first time he lost bowel control, he’d drive to the Grand Canyon and jump off.

My own non-serious answer is to be tickled to death, sheerly for the punniness of it.

Anecdotally, young men were more fancy-free about their answers, while the older folks and women I spoke with gave more measured answers or sat quietly. 

One old standby came up quite a lot: dying of old age in my bed, surrounded by family. The hospital nurses I asked had a twist on that trope: in bed, surrounded by family, and dying of kidney failure. Among nurses, there was consensus that this is the best way to go if you’re near death and in intensive care — you just fade out and pass, one ICU nurse told me. In the medical community, there’s debate about how calm death by kidney failure actually is, but really, who can you ask?

These answers are all interesting, but my nurse friend got me wondering about people who deal with death on the regular — what do they think about the best death? 

 they think about it? Surely hospice workers, physicians, oncologists, “right-to-die” advocates, cancer-cell biologists, bioethicists, and the like have a special view on dying. What might their more-informed criteria be for my “best death” query?

I started with a concept that I think most can agree with — an ideal death should be painless.

Turns out, a painless death is a pretty American way to think about dying

Jim Cleary, a physician in Madison, Wisconsin, specializes in

, cancer-related pain relief, and discussing difficult diagnoses with patients. “Eighty percent of the world’s population lacks access to opioids,” he tells me. That includes morphine, fentanyl, oxycodone, and many of the other drugs used to soothe patients in the United States. Cleary is director of the 

World Health Organization’s pain and policy studies group

, which is working to get these relief drugs to other nations to help those in need — burn and trauma victims, cancer patients, and women giving birth.

In his work with American cancer patients, he’s careful not to suggest that dying will be comfortable. “I can’t promise ‘pain-free,’” he says. What he can promise is that he’ll try his best to help patients end their lives as they wish. “Listen to your patients,” he tells his colleagues, “they have the answers.”

Cleary says you can lump the different ways we die into categories. The first is the sudden death. “That’s not going to be a reality for most of us,” he’s quick to point out. The other category is the long death, which is what most of us will likely experience. “The reality is death from cancer,” says Cleary, “where you actually know it’s going to happen, and you can say goodbye.”

, a man’s risk of dying from cancer is 1 in 4, and a woman’s 1 in 5. (It’s important to note that those numbers are just for 

 from one of the many types of cancer, from bladder to brain, prostate to ovaries. The odds that a man will 

 cancer are 1 in 2; for women, 1 in 3. Reality, indeed.) In long-death cases, most care does not extend life so much as extend the dying process, a fact noted by many end-of-life experts, from

Cleary thinks the idea of a “best” death or even a “good” death is a little misleading, as if it’s a competition or something one can fail at. He prefers the term “healthy dying,” which isn’t as oxymoronic as it sounds. To him, healthy dying means that death is “well-prepared for, it’s expected, and other people know about it.”

The idea of a “best” or even a “good” death is a bit misleading — as if it’s a competition. 

Cleary prefers the term “healthy dying.”

“We as a society have to do much, much more on accepting death as a normal part of living,” he says. “So rather than even talking about what’s ‘the best way to die,’ how do we 

 dying?” In a country where funeral parlors handle our dead and corpses no longer rest for days in our own parlors at home, 

we’re rather removed from the whole ordeal

Still, I press Dr. Cleary to answer the question at hand: How would he choose to die? “Would it be sudden death walking along a beach in Florida?” he ventures, then quickly reconsiders. “But if your family doesn’t know you’re dead — dad goes for a walk or run and doesn’t come back — is that good for them? It may be good for me, but it may not be good for them.”

No One Dies Alone (NODA), a nonprofit volunteer organization

 formed in 2002 by a nurse named Sandra Clark. NODA’s founding principle is that no one is born alone, and no one should die alone, either.

NODA volunteers work in groups of nine. Each carries a pager 24 hours a day during their assigned shifts, so that one of them is always available to attend a death. Usually, a nurse makes the phone call summoning NODA volunteers. The vast majority of people who NODA visits are comatose. But that makes no difference, the principle abides; comatose or not, it’s still important for someone — anyone — to be present.

Anne Gordon, NODA’s current program director, has helped hospitals around the country start the program in their facilities. She has a worldly perspective similar to Cleary’s, and different from the expectations that most Americans have on the topic of death.

“Dying is a process, not [just] the last breath,” says Gordon. If you’re a hospital patient in the process of dying, there’s a specific protocol to qualify for NODA services. You need to be actively dying — estimated to pass in the next day or so. (“Seasoned nurses can tell,” Gordon says, which is why they’re often the ones to page the NODA volunteers.) You must have reached a point where you will not receive any further interventions — that means comfort care 

, with a required “do not resuscitate” order. And you must be without family or friends who can keep you company as you pass away.

Nobody? How does it happen that a person has nobody to visit when they die?

“Sometimes a person’s outlived everyone, or they’re estranged,” Gordon explains. Maybe they 

 have family, but for whatever reason, the loved ones needed to leave, or live far away, or just cannot bear to be present. Some of the patients are homeless and, just as in their healthier days, have no one to comfort them. Whatever the reason, NODA will be there.

“Dying is a process, not [just] the last breath,” says Gordon.

As Gordon sees it, death is an act of meaning, and the process — what she calls “the human family coming together” — is an act of intentionality and love. “I find the whole process to be so compelling,” she says. “It’s our shared experience — a key transition we all share.”

Gordon, a Baby Boomer, sees her work and the recent public interest in end-of-life issues as a byproduct of her generation aging — an extension of the consciousness-raising of the 1960s and “one of the good echoes” from that era, she quips. “As we get closer to death, we like to talk about these things.”

 where friends and strangers get together, eat cake, and talk about dying. There are high-demand conferences where people share their personal experiences of loss and grief. There are bestselling books about coming to terms with your own mortality and how to prepare for death — spiritually, familially, and financially. Even Costco, the bulk-retail giant, sells coffins alongside its low-price tire changes and discount cruises. It’s mostly just static noise, though. Death is never fully discussed, only hinted at from the margins.

Gordon believes that now — with Baby Boomers entering retirement, many losing their parents, and many more coming to grips with their own mortality — is the moment to talk through these issues as a culture, to discuss the process of death in specific terms, beyond the anecdotal and platitudinal. “When death is a daily concept,” 

, she offers, “it’s not as terrifying. What matters is quality of life.”

When I ask Gordon how she’d like to die, she demurs. “I have no answer. I figure it’ll be what’s appropriate for me.”

 and drama therapist in Brooklyn, New York. Similar to how birth doulas help pregnant women bring new life to the world, end-of-life doulas help people on their way out.

Edgar grew up with a mom who worked in nursing homes, and young Pamela sometimes tagged along, visiting people at different stages in their lives, including the final ones. As she grew older, Edgar got especially interested in those last months: “What is the kind of relationship that you can have with someone when it might be one of their last new relationships? What can that be like?” she wondered.

Edgar has worked in nursing home dementia units and other late-life facilities for the past eight years. After working in a Veterans Administration hospital during an internship as a creative arts therapist, she requested to go to the hospice unit. (“Nobody ever asks to do that!” she remembers her supervisor replying.) For the past three years, she’s been an end-of-life counselor with 

. The organization is primarily known for advocating right-to-die legislation at the state level, but it also helps anybody seeking assistance to “plan for and achieve a good death.”

“As a drama therapist,” Edgar says softly, “I look a lot at roles that people play in their life, and one of the things that I really see — and this is a little bit related to a good way to die — I see that for a lot of us, a lot of our lives are spent 

 for other people, how we define ourselves by these roles that are really about what we 

. And as people get older, of course, that role system gets smaller, and often people can’t do all the things they used to do. I think it’s really an interesting moment for people then: What is their identity, and who are they now?”

For many, dying becomes about control and autonomy, she says. “

 are really important for some people.”

Others get spiritual. Edgar shares the example of a patient in his 70s who’d been diagnosed with ALS and lost the ability to do many of the things he loved. “He decided that he was ready, and he and his wife kind of describe it that ‘his spirit had outgrown his body.’ He was on hospice care and he chose to stop eating and drinking, and the wife had a lot of support, and hospice was really excellent and supportive of them. It was a very peaceful passing for him.”

Peaceful. Especially given the circumstances of a degenerative illness, “peaceful” seems like an indispensable criterion for the “best” death.

Peaceful. 
“Peaceful” seems like an indispensable criterion for the “best” death.

Edgar has been particularly affected by seeing choice taken away from patients. Many of the people she worked with early in her career wanted to go home but, because of what she calls the country’s “medical model” of dying, never were able to. After helping hundreds of people with their deaths — filing wills, deciding on final treatments, aiding loved ones with the transition — she’s developed an idea of a good death that’s based on her background in psychology. You’ve heard it before: letting go.

“Ultimately, we are going into an unknown,” Edgar says. “Even when people think or have ideas about what’s next, truth is, we don’t have proof. So there is that sense of going into an unknown and do people feel ready — body, mind, and spirit? Are they really ready to go?”

Sometimes, Edgar says, the body and mind are ready, but the person isn’t emotionally there yet. Or vice versa — the person feels spiritually ready, but their body’s still holding on.

“My personal answer for the best way to die is being ready, like being physically, emotionally, spiritually ready to go.”

Before we end our conversation, she stresses a point to me: “Life and death are not opposites,” she says. “We haven’t figured out how to stop either. They’re partners.”

In the autumn of 2014, the story of Brittany Maynard

 incited conversations on this topic in average American living rooms. Maynard, a 29-year-old newlywed, was diagnosed with an incurable brain cancer that gave her seizures, double vision, headaches, and other terrible symptoms that inevitably would intensify until her almost surely agonizing death.

As she looked at that future, Maynard decided that she wanted to end her life on her own terms with the help of legal medication. Unfortunately, she lived in California, which didn’t allow doctors to write life-ending prescriptions. So Maynard, her husband, and her mother packed up and moved to Oregon, where the right to die is legally recognized.

Maynard partnered with Compassion & Choices

 to spread the word about her journey for a good death. Her story appeared on the cover of 

 — you name it. Such a young woman facing such a terrible fate: it’s compelling, even wrenching, and hard to turn away from.

Disregard your personal beliefs on the morality of this situation for a moment, and think about what you would do in the face of an agonizing terminal diagnosis. Would you seek medical care until the very last breath, demanding chemo from your deathbed? Or would you prefer to go without, letting the disease take its natural course? Which path do you fear the most?

David Grube is an Oregon family doctor who, in his own words, has “delivered babies and sung at people’s funerals.” He wants to die “feeling perfectly well, and just not wake up.” Over his 35-year career, he has prescribed life-ending drugs to about 30 patients (though “aid in dying,” as it’s often called, only became legal in Oregon — and for the first in time the United States — in 1994). He did not prescribe Maynard’s medication, but he did talk to me about the process of aiding in a patient’s death.

the medical director for Compassion & Choices

, says that though many people ask for the drugs, few end up using them. 

 a psychological evaluation, sign-off from two different physicians, and a 15-day waiting period before they’re available. The fatal dose will be a barbiturate like pentobarbital, a sedative that’s also used in animal euthanasia — it’s the same drug as the “sleeping pill” that killed Marilyn Monroe, Grube notes — or secobarbital, a bitter anesthetic and sleep aid. Someone like Brittany Maynard would likely stir the drug into a glass of juice, drink it, then await its effects.

In her final message to the public, Maynard wrote

, “The world is a beautiful place, travel has been my greatest teacher, my close friends and folks are the greatest givers. I even have a ring of support around my bed as I type. … Goodbye world. Spread good energy. Pay it forward!” Her husband, Dan Diaz, said that as she took the medication, “The mood in the house was very peaceful, very loving.” Within five minutes, she fell asleep. Then she died.

Grube says that’s usually how it goes with these cases: within an hour or two, the person stops breathing and experiences “a peaceful, simple death.” On the rare occasion when the patient takes the medication with a glass of milk or with a large dose of anticonstipation medication (vanity doesn’t automatically disappear with terminal illness), they will sometimes wake up. But when taken as prescribed, most people who choose to end their life this way will, like Maynard, pass with tranquility. It is, in a word, peaceful.

Another term for Maynard’s act is “physician-assisted suicide,” but Grube rejects that concept wholeheartedly. “They don’t 

 to die!” he says. “‘Suicide’ is such a harmful word ... and words are scalpels; they can be healing, kind, or destructive.” Some of Grube’s allies prefer the term “physician-assisted dying,” while others talk about the “

” Compassion & Choices has settled on its own values-based language to discuss cases like Brittany Maynard: “death with dignity.” Partly due to Maynard’s activism, 

the California legislature and Governor Jerry Brown passed the “End of Life Option Act” this October

, just before the one-year anniversary of her death.

Grube says most people who ask for these prescriptions are educated, motivated, and confident. What they want, he explains, is to determine the 

Control. When a disease is controlling your body and mind, when you’ve lost pleasure in the things you once loved, when you’re in pain, when you’re suffering and you fear burdening those around you, when there’s nothing more to do but wait for death, having the power to take — or not take — life-ending drugs can be a supreme comfort. But it’s a fine line of morality.

As a philosopher and bioethicist at Vanderbilt University, John Lachs considers these situations all the time. His mother, Magda, lived to 103, but given her ever-increasing collection of age-related illnesses, 

, “living longer seemed to her utterly pointless: the pain, the indignity and the growing communicative isolation overshadowed her native optimism and the joy she had always taken in being alive. She decided that she had had enough and she was ready to die.”

Magda stockpiled prescriptions, ready to overdose on them, but lost them in a move, according to her son. She tried to die by abstaining from food and drink, but, as Lachs put it, “there was enough love of life left in her to make this a regimen she could not sustain.”

Is it okay to help someone else die? Lachs argues that “doctors should help us through every stage of life,” including the final one. Furthermore, exercising freedom — in this case, the freedom of choice to end one’s life — is not the same as following moral rules. “We have the right to terminate our lives even if it is wrong to do so,” Lachs says — with an important caveat. “Healthy young adults who propose to kill themselves cannot demand aid from others. … The situation is altogether different with suicide that is justifiable.”

To Lachs, context is of the utmost importance. “We don’t want people to choose death over life,” he tells me. But when the end is near anyway, and the person is suffering, what’s the argument against it?

The philosopher has developed a set of five standards for the ideal death:

1. It must be after a person has exhausted his purpose; there’s got to be nothing more for him to truly do.

2. Corresponding to the loss of purpose is a lessening of energy — mental and physical.

3. The person’s affairs should be in order — paperwork, wills, goodbyes, all of it.

4. The person should feel he’s leaving something good behind — “I didn’t live for naught.”

5. The death should be quick and painless.

Lachs has seen and heard of people who are near death but linger on. “It’s so much better when the other conditions are met and they just pass on,” Lachs says. “Ideally, life is such that it gives you a chance to get ready for death.

“Nobody has ever survived life. The bet is going to be lost. 

 of life is uncertain. We think it’s not, and contingency is the name of the game. But ultimately, we’re going to have to come to terms with the end of it.”

Magda, Lachs’ mother, finally did pass in the “subterfuge” way that hospice workers sometimes quietly administer: a nurse offered a morphine solution that depressed Magda’s lung function and finally accelerated her death.

What’s the best way to die? It’s a question that Lachs has spent time considering. His favorite answer comes from a medical colleague of his, but it’s an old yarn: being shot to death at 90 years old by an irate husband while biking away from sleeping with the gun-toting man’s wife.

Barring that, Lachs says, he’d like to die having met his own criteria — quickly, of a heart attack.

One of the last people I posed my question to

 was Doris Benbrook, director of research in gynecologic oncology at the University of Oklahoma. Her specialty is much different from the health care staff I’d spoken to previously — she studies cancer on the cellular level, particularly apoptosis, or programmed cell death. Does the microscopic level of dying give us any other ways to think about the best way to go?

In its most basic sense, a cancer cell over-multiplies and begins causing bodily trouble. “At the organ and tissue level, it eats away at vital organs. It grows, duplicates, divides.” That clogs up organs, cascades into other systems, and makes its body croak. How utterly unfair of something so tiny. Some cancers you barely feel, like the notoriously silent ovarian cancer, while others, like bone cancer, cause immense, deep pain.

Benbrook’s work with apoptosis aims to switch off that growth, to figure out how to flip the cell’s existing kill-switch so it can’t wreak such havoc. Years from now, she hopes, doctors could even use this mechanism as a cancer-prevention method.

Interestingly enough, CPR and other familiar cardiovascular attempts to keep people alive take the opposite tack: “They want to 

 cell death,” Benbrook notes. So there are many different ways to think about what the end of a cell means for the end of the human. But cells die constantly, and a few cells dying here and there don’t kill a person. Even though our cells die with us, she stressed that the microscopic level isn’t the right place to look when considering dying.

Her personal answer to the best way to die, however, was my favorite, if only for its imagery.

“I would like to die by freezing to death,” she says. “Because from what I understand of the process, it’s that you eventually just go numb and don’t feel anything. I have experienced extreme pain. I don’t ever want to do it again. I would like to go peacefully.”

 she’d like to freeze to death that moved me.

“I would think that if I were to just sit on an iceberg floating up in the Arctic Ocean, that it would be a peaceful death. I could look up at the stars, I could think about life, and it could be a good experience.”

The frozen night air blowing over your body. The dead quiet of nature interrupted only by laps of the ocean and the occasional fish flopping out of the water. The icy sensation of your tears freezing as you look up at the Great Bear constellation for the last time. That really doesn’t seem like such a bad way to go.

Floating on an iceberg in the Arctic Ocean, the frigid air sweeping over your body as you look at the nighttime sky. 
It doesn’t seem like a bad way to go.

But Benbrook and I come quickly back to land. “Of course I would like to have my family surrounding me, and the chances that I’m going to go sit up on an iceberg in the Arctic Ocean to die — that is not likely.” She laughs. “I’d probably be laying in a bed surrounded by loved ones. My goal would be to go peacefully.” Back to the beginning.

So I turn to you, brave and patient reader:

 from the absurd to the probable, how would you like to die? Allow yourself to think about it, in as far as you’re ready to do so. Do you want a breathing tube snaked down your throat if it becomes necessary? Do you want to be fed if you can’t do it yourself? Would you mind dying in a hospital? You can even get down to ambient details — do you want punk music blasting, a warm room, someone rubbing your swollen feet?

Whatever you wish, however deeply you’re willing to think about it, the key is to share your ideas about a good death. Talk to your family, write down what you want, and keep it somewhere they know about. Ask people about it at parties. As anyone who’s made a “pull the plug” decision can tell you, 

 guidance you leave will be helpful if you can’t speak for yourself on your last day.

This is your last possible decision, after all — better make it a good one.

 is a writer and editor who lives in Pittsburgh. In grad school, she worked as an editorial assistant on

At the End of Life: True Stories About How We Die

which furthered her interest in death, dying, and green burials.

Her mother and husband still won’t answer the big question yet — if you see them, please ask them about dying. Tweet her your answer to the question on

. Furthermore, she apologizes if this story made you sad.

BestWayToDie.jpg

Given hypothetical, anything-goes permission to choose from a creepy, unlimited vending machine of endings, what would you select? Should you have the right to choose?

What’s the best way to die?

A SECONDHAND STORE IN A SECONDHAND TOWN IS ABOUT WHAT YOU’D EXPECT

. A bit derelict, a bit kooky. Rows of thin gold necklaces, mostly crosses and hearts too small to melt down for scrap. Four Sony PlayStations, only two of which work. Boxes of cords to who knows what. Tools — piles of screwdrivers and buzz saws and toolboxes and doohickeys on collapsible tables. Scuffed guitars hanging by their necks. Guns and more guns — some mounted on a pegboard wall and others stuck in a cardboard barrel, butts up. Unopened, unwatchable movies. “Kitchen” scales never purchased for cooking.

In a place like Braddock, Pennsylvania, nothing much surprises you. It’s a poor place, mostly black, mostly a shadow of the boomtown steel days. Some say they should just tear the whole place up and pave a highway through it. Others suggest a new shopping mall in lieu of the roadway. Still others think it should become a green paradise, a playground for artists and intellectuals to put down roots and educate people on sustainability.

Norm doesn’t take much stock in those ideas.

“It didn’t look too good when I got here,” he says of Braddock and the shop. His father-in-law had owned Steel City Pawnbrokers since 1952 and Norm started working here because of his wife. Her father needed some help, and Norm had just quit his job at Stop-N-Go in nearby Oakland.

“It’s a timeless business, one of the oldest in the world — before malls,” he proclaims.

Despite just barely staying afloat (he and the other employees call it a “miracle,” and none of them are quite sure of the true balance of the store’s books), Norm is in five days a week, usually perched on a secondhand stool between Dennis and Ray. Dennis is the “music guy,” mid-forties with black curly hair. He’s the odd man out of the trio — more spry than Norm or Ray, a bit more hip. He works here for the health insurance and to supplement his income as a jazz musician. Ray doesn’t seem to have anything better to do, so he keeps coming in. And Norm?

“I’ve wanted to get out of here a number of times,” he says. “I used to work with my wife’s uncle, and he wanted it his way” — stock perfectly aligned, interactions with customers strictly prescribed.

“I’d quit at least once a week. I’d walk out, and my father-in-law would call and tell me, ‘I’m not gonna be around forever, you’ll be in charge eventually.’”

“He left you an empire!” Ray chimes in. Norm rubs his balding head, amused. When he smiles, he looks a little like Dopey from 

. He took over Steel City in the mid-1990s after his wife’s dad died. Even so: “My father-in-law has got some grip on me and won’t go away.”

“It takes balls to own a pawn shop,” Ray assures. He’s in his mid-fifties and sits next to Norm in a chair with a strap-on back massager. The seat and style screams hotel décor and is no doubt one of the many “finds” they’ve come across over the years. Ray has a bad… well, everything, and rarely rises from his throne unless he has to. Dennis mills around the store, fiddling with guitars or tools, singing “Let It Be” in front of a wall of worn LPs.

It would be easy to imagine Norm and Ray sitting almost anywhere — two retirees at the end of a dock with fishing poles propped in their metal lawn chairs; on a front porch gripping beers and using a cooler as a table; waiting for their wives in the lobby of a hair salon — and nothing would change, not the timbre of their days or their conversations over cans of Coke and bag lunches. Their work at Steel City strikes less as a job than a hobby, a habit, a favor to no one in particular.

 Steel country — home to Andrew Carnegie’s first mill, in fact. The industrial nexus of the Monongahela, Allegheny, and Ohio rivers. Jobs, families, and children. Streets with movie theaters, pharmacies, and restaurants. Schools with trophy-winning football teams. America’s first supermarket, an A&P, opened here. Carnegie’s first library, too.

The short and dirty narrative of its decline, oft repeated in national and local media: In the 1920s, more than 20,000 people called Braddock home. Industry bloomed; soot stuck to aging stony buildings. In the 1970s, steel crashed and took livelihoods with it in an economic free fall. In 2009, a full fifth of the population earned less than $10,000 annually. Today, fewer than 2,200 residents remain, and Braddock’s median income has dropped to less than half the state average.

To the extent that there are newcomers in Braddock, they seem drawn by a sense of possibility or duty; gentrifiers, yes, but also those who feel the pull of an aging mother. Some are lured by promises of cheap land and a marketing campaign underwritten by Levi’s and driven by the town’s big and brash mayor, John Fetterman. He’s a newcomer too, arriving in 2001 as a volunteer for AmeriCorps, which he joined after finishing grad school at Harvard. “Everyone in the country is asking, ‘Where’s the bottom?’” he told the 

 in 2009. “I think we’ve found it.”

Fetterman is ambitious in the way most settlers are: full of zeal and raw hope, with a lot to learn about the tricky dynamics of a place in flux. If he waves hello to the librarian but not the barber as he drives his old pickup truck down the main drag, Braddock is close enough that word will get around and slights will magnify. There’s a cautious acceptance of outsiders here — why shut down potential? — but also a distrust — what do you want from us?

None of the guys in Steel City live in Braddock, nor are they from the borough originally. They arrived after the steel boom, but before the town really fell to pieces, before it lost its hospital, a major employer (regional healthcare giant UPMC shut it down in 2010, taking 600 jobs with it), and before all that remained was a bar, another secondhand shop, and a smattering of hair salons and clubs. 

A Kickstarter-funded restaurant is expected to open soon

. Whether it will go the way of the community farm and Steel City and stick around, or the way of the donut shop and the Subway, it’s hard to tell.

Nobody stays for long in a place like this, unless they stay for good

“I quit one day,” Norm confides. This was back before he took over the business. “Then the alarm went off.”

The burglar alarm. Steel City has been broken into more times than the guys can count. Once — before the city knocked down so many buildings, creating vacant lots that less suggest opportunity than emptiness — someone broke in by digging into the basement, burrowing through a shared wall to steal a cache of guns. The perpetrator was never caught.

Ray tells another story of the tenant upstairs, in the room they used to rent out as an apartment, who ripped through the room’s floorboards, knocked out a ceiling tile, and squeezed down herself — or had her child crawl down — and stole money from the register. She skipped town the next day. The ceiling tile was never replaced.

That’s not counting the many broken windows, the attempts to pry the security bars off the doors. Many of the storefronts in Braddock are closed off with plywood, scheduled for demolition. Despite all that, it’s inaccurate to say the town is empty. On warm summer days, a woman grills chicken and serves homemade macaroni and cheese to crowds outside Miltons Top Notch Hair Salon. Men fish at the brown river near the railroad tracks; the library holds fundraisers to refurbish its theater and job seminars to help the unemployed. People leak from buildings that looked abandoned, forming a tiny community willing to celebrate even potential renovation.

 — I’d just toss the junk in there,” Norm says. “I’ve tried to sell or liquidate. But my only hope is my 

 no-good son-in-law.” Though his daughters are still in college and unmarried, he seems to be truly holding out for this possibility.

Why stay open? Why keep coming in to work?

Norm’s best answer: “You never know what’s gonna walk in.”

“Buy the item, not the story.” That’s Norm’s motto. Take what’s in front of you, not what it was or could be. And do what you can with it. What little cash Steel City does bring in depends on their shrewdness, on Norm and Ray and Dennis’s ability to resist the story.

Once, a man came in with a rubber replica vagina, claiming it had only been used once. “We don’t buy that sort of thing here,” the guys told him. (Though they do buy videos that might accompany such a device.) That’s Dennis’s favorite story.

More commonly, though, people drop in with a TV, insisting that their big boxy machine is worth more than the dozen other TVs in the shop. The TVs are always on, usually mutely flashing daytime shows like 

, never any pawn store reality shows, which the guys say are “bogus.”

The people bringing in TVs say they’ve just upgraded to a new flat screen, so they want to ditch this one. Sounds reasonable — so do many of the stories coming into Steel City. More often than not, though, the TV’s been stolen, sometimes from a family member or roommate. Days later, the true owner comes knocking, demanding their merch. Usually, Norm calls the police and gives the thing back.

Norm: “If you ask, ‘Why are you selling?’— ”

“—you’ll hear a lie,” Ray finishes. Every time.

Ray: “If it’s suspicious, you ask more questions … a guy selling a girl’s ring, for instance.”

“You get stories,” Norm continues. “‘I got it from my grandmother.’ It’s always from a grandparent.” The customer claims she just wanted to get rid of it, or it was inherited. Often that’s not the case.

“If they tell the truth they’d say: ‘I killed my grandmother.’” Ray says. “They kill a lady and steal the jewelry and take it straight to a pawn shop.”

Theft and selling scams are partly why Pennsylvania enacted ID laws regarding buying and selling at secondhand stores — in theory, it keeps the bad guys out. But so long as the seller has an ID and the right item, the guys will buy from anyone.

ON ONE OF THEIR BUSIER AFTERNOONS DURING THE DEPTHS OF THE RECESSION

, a couple of preteen kids come in, one sporting a mohawk. “It’s my birthday, what can I get for free?”

Norm and Dennis answer in tandem. Norm: “Where’s your driver’s license?” Dennis: “You can get a handshake.”

The kid rejects Dennis’s offer and wanders around the ancient videogames hoping for a good deal.

“That’s the place to buy it then,” Norm responds, without missing a beat.

Boys seem drawn to the shop, sometimes to look at the electronics or guitars, but almost always to admire the guns, the rows and rows of firearms and knives just behind Norm and Ray. Minors aren’t permitted to touch the weapons.

Today, the kids linger a moment too long and Norm tells them he’s about to close, even though it’s only 1:30. They take the hint and leave without a fuss.

Dennis’s attention is now on to the weaponry. He walks between Ray and Norm and picks up what he says is an AK-47.

“Doesn’t it give you a woody?” He laughs.

“If a kid needs to take a gun to school, that’s the kind he wants,” Norm offers, nodding.

A guy wearing black polka-dot pajama pants walks in, reeking of stale smoke and looking for a scale. Dennis puts down the gun and helps him. Thirty dollars cash and he’s out the door.

“WHEN IT’S SLOW, YOU WANT TO COMMIT SUICIDE,”

 Ray says. It’s been a sluggish day, and the guys are waxing philosophical about the business.

“It used to be a mom-and-pop thing, now it’s corporate,” Norm says. Locally owned pawn shops are succumbing to their own big box competitors. Chain stores like Pawn America spring up in suburbs all around the country. TV shows like 

, have popularized the notion that everyday schmucks can find goldmines in storage units. With buy-and-sell becoming more popular, pawn jobs have changed.

“Customers are more informed than they used to be,” Norm says, rubbing his bald head. And that makes their job trickier. “You’re an authority on everything, expert on nothing.”

“You can find anything out in the Internet,” he says. Craigslist and eBay have drastically cut into their business, though Norm concedes that the Internet has its upsides. “It’s harder to get something good, but when you do…” His words trail off as the bounty takes shape in his imagination.

“My father-in-law would run around buying new goods to sell,” Norm explains. “A good buy is better than a good sell.” But they don’t do much around-town seeking anymore — enough people stop in already, and there’s just not enough money in it, given the time and gas that searching requires. Plus, Ray adds, “You still gotta sell what you got.”

When an item and a story come in, they have a default response: It’s in OK shape. Everything’s always got scratches. Saxophones, gold rings, power tools. No matter what, the guys can find a defect.

Working at the pawn shop seems less like a job than a hobby or a habit — a favor to no one in particular

Talking the seller down in price is half of the equation, but you also have to consider who might buy it later. In a place like Braddock, stuff has to get fixed. That means hammers and ladders and saws sell, which is why they have so many tools (and why tools bring in so much of their business). “It’s a mistake to say it isn’t sellable if you wouldn’t buy it,” Norm says. He wouldn’t have use for a ladder, he says, but the handymen making a few bucks around town do.

Beyond tools, Norm was shocked when child-sized drum sets, purchased on a whim, became bestsellers for a while in the nineties. Another time he had 

 sitting there for literally years. “No idea what it was ... got a couple hundred bucks for it.” A box of 200 black and neon sunglasses sat around for so long that they came back in style again. You can never tell.

The truly big bucks are in unexpected “sleeper” items — something valuable that nobody catches at first: Your aunt’s thimble collection that happened to originate in the nineteenth century, or the guitar with a hidden signature — the hiding-in-plain-sight, 

Not that they’d catch such a thing. Steel City has what can only be described as “stuff” piled all over the basement and the old apartment upstairs. Portraits not even hipsters would ever hang on their walls. A broken 1920s-style cash register. Countless buckets of half-used and dried-out paint. Two-by-fours. Spider webs. More bins of miscellaneous electrical cords.

Every once in a while somebody — always a man, usually a tinkerer — will start hanging around the shop and shoot the breeze with the guys. The newcomer will offer to clean things up a bit, fix some of the broken items, identify a few cords. He’ll probably refuse any money for it. Then he’ll be gone, just as strangely as he came, never heard from again. Nobody stays for long in a place like this, unless they stay for good.

. Dennis can’t turn down an uncommon instrument. Recently, someone brought in “the coolest thing they’ve ever had”: a Suzuki Omnichord. Despite being incredibly obscure and prohibitively expensive, he bought it for a couple hundred dollars. Its shape is similar to a guitar body, but without strings, tuning pegs, or frets; instead, it has buttons arranged in three rows — major, minor, and 7th chord. Other buttons trigger electronic beats. The overall sound tends toward a church organ crossed with the entire decade of the 1980s. It will almost certainly never sell, and Dennis is fine with that.

Norm, on the other hand, is partial to pinball games. His basement at home is loaded with them, filled to my-wife-will-kill-me-if-I-bought-another capacity. But at the shop, he’s got just one machine, a game from the 1960s called “Touchdown.” It stands in the front display window, just out of the sunlight, where it has waited for years to be sold. The sides and front are white with blue and green triangular stripes intersecting. The paint is scratched near the coin slot, exposing the wood underneath, where dozens of fingers once dug around for change — a dime for one play, a quarter for three.

When the machine is off, the flipper buttons produce an impotent nothing, and you’re left wondering if the game functions at all, if it should have a “broken” masking-tape sticker gumming up its glass like so many other items. Norm plugs it in and the lights start flashing, the bells inside jingle to life. It worked the whole time, just needed a dusting and a little jolt.

Its jangles and thumps fill the entire shop, and it’s hard not to note that this seemingly dead thing still has a little life left. That it just needs a person who cares to flip the switch, to give it a shot. That despite its worn-out looks and cracking façade, it’s still worth something — at least to somebody, even if they aren’t perfect either.

Robyn K. Coggins