When Lenore Mullarney died of congestive heart failure, her friends gathered around her bed, held hands and sang.

Alleluia, alleluia, alleluia!

The strife is o'er, the battle done,

the victory of life is won;

the song of triumph has begun.

Alleluia!

For three days she had lain silent, eyes closed, fighting an internal battle. For three hours her friends stayed by her after she stopped breathing.

Alleluia, alleluia, alleluia!

The powers of death have done their worst,

but Christ their legions hath dispersed:

let shout of holy joy outburst.

Alleluia!

For most of her life, Mullarney had been a community activist, first with the Ohio-based Glenmary Home Mission Sisters of America and later with organizations such as the Commission on Religion in Appalachia in Knoxville, Tenn.

But when she lost most of her sight to macular degeneration, lost her mobility to osteoporosis and lost her strength to congestive heart failure, she moved to Abingdon. There she shared a house with longtime friends Kathy Hutson and Catherine Rumschlag.

Hutson and Rumschlag, along with three other friends - Dene Peterson, Jean Marie Luce and Anne Leibig - formed a "care committee" to look after Mullarney. They took turns cooking for her, answering her mail, paying her bills, taking her to church, even sleeping nearby, for the last two years of her life.

"Death is a moment of great grace," Hutson said. "You feel honored that someone's willing to share that moment with you. It's a part of life. It's an important time."

Peterson spent two hours a day, five days a week, with Mullarney, but it wasn't a burden, she insists. "Usefulness to others builds self-esteem," Peterson said. "Older people need to have things to make them feel useful."

When Mullarney died Feb. 23, 2002, in her own bed, surrounded by people she'd known for more than 30 years, it was the beginning of a new way to age and die in America. It was the beginning of ElderSpirit

ElderSpirit, when it is completed sometime this year, will be the nation's first mixed-income, co-housing community for adults 55 and older. Twenty-nine houses and apartments, an interfaith meditation chapel, a garden and a common house will sit on just under 4 acres of land at the corner of Hickman and Lowland streets in Abingdon.

But organizers insist the project will be more than a housing development for retirees. It will be a community where residents commit to caring for one another as they age and struggle with illness. It will be a community where everyone will live a spiritual or religious life. It will be a community that works to fill needs in the larger community. It will be a community where people find meaning in late life and die a good death.

Virginia Tech gerontologist Anne Glass helped develop the concept for ElderSpirit. She sees a growing crisis, not only in the number of people aging in America, but also in the way America cares for its elderly. Families and seniors must struggle through a tangle of bureaucracy to get needed services and often become overwhelmed emotionally, physically and financially.

Researchers estimate that 50,000 centenarians - persons 100 years old or older - were living in the United States in 2000. By 2050, these researchers say, there will be 1 million or more. But the number of caregivers - traditionally women under 55 - will increase by only 7 percent.

Glass believes communities like ElderSpirit may offer a new solution: seniors caring for each other.

"We didn't know we were doing the prototype of ElderSpirit at the time, but we realized it later," Peterson said. "Lenore showed us that with mutual support, people could die at home, and it wasn't a burden to anybody."

Peterson has been the driving force behind ElderSpirit. Her motivations were simple. "I didn't want to die alone," she said.

So she contacted old friends at the Federation of Communities in Service, or FOCIS, a nonprofit organization started in 1967 by breakaway members of the Glenmary Home Mission Sisters of America, a Roman Catholic religious order.

The former sisters, many of them from Northern and Midwestern cities, came to the rural South in the 1950s to bring Catholicism and community development to the hollows and hills. But Rome took issue with the sisters' lifestyle and their dress. The young women were living in apartments, traveling to meetings at night and wearing short habits.

After long months of struggle and negotiation, nearly half of the 100 sisters broke with the order. Some went their own ways, but a core group of more than 40 founded FOCIS.

The women of FOCIS planned to keep their vows of poverty, chastity and obedience and to live communally. They were determined to continue organizing workers, opening food co-operatives and homeless shelters and establishing community arts programs. But as the women moved out into the secular world, they faced challenges they hadn't anticipated. Without the financial support of the church, FOCIS members could not function as they'd hoped.

Today FOCIS endures as a network of skilled community workers, both women and men. The members have established dozens of outreach programs across Appalachia and even published a book about their history titled "Mountain Sisters: From Convent to Community in Appalachia."

Facing aging and illness themselves, members of FOCIS in 1995 formed the committee that eventually led to ElderSpirit. The committee chose Abingdon for the same reasons other retirees have moved there - The Barter Theatre, the William King Regional Arts Center, the College for Older Adults and The Virginia Creeper Trail, among other amenities.

Peterson found a 3.7-acre piece of property near the Creeper Trail in a neighborhood called King's Mountain. The neighborhood, recently the beneficiary of community block grant funds, had also installed new sidewalks and drainage systems and repaired many blighted houses. FOCIS members kicked in money to buy the property. Then Peterson, a novice at real estate development, plunged ahead to find funding.

Half of the $3 million project costs will be met by public grants and loans and half will come from the sale of homes. Apartments in the community will include subsidized and market-rate rentals.

Unlike most retirement communities, ElderSpirit is based on old-fashioned baby boomer values: environmentalism (organic gardening is encouraged; cars are discouraged); diversity (it's located in a low-income, traditionally black neighborhood and welcomes all faiths, races and sexual orientations); and social justice (government-subsidized apartments stand alongside market-value homes).

King's Mountain residents are excited about ElderSpirit's moving in, according to Harriet DeBose, who was born and raised there and serves on the Abingdon Planning Commission.

"It's bringing in something we've never had before. It's bringing in culture, bringing in people from all over the country," she said.

Judy Eda is one of those new people moving to the community. She came to Blacksburg three years ago from California hoping to buy a house in Shadowlake Village, a co-housing community off Glade Road. But as the community developed, home prices quickly outpaced her budget. A freelance copy editor nearing retirement, Eda's greatest fear is that she will outlive her funds.

When a friend told her about ElderSpirit, she quickly joined the residents' association. The values of the community appealed to Eda, including its commitment to affordability and communal living. Co-housing is better than a democracy, Eda said, because the majority doesn't rule over a disaffected minority. In co-housing communities, all decisions are made by consensus. Eda also admires the FOCIS members who founded the community.

"They are some interesting people. Some of them have been arrested for protesting the School of the Americas. These are some serious troublemakers," she said, laughing appreciatively.

Builders have yet to raise the first wall of ElderSpirit, yet site preparation is well under way, and nearly all the planned units have been sold or rented. Visitors from as far away as California come to watch the 28-member residents' association hash out the conflicts of living together and to get advice on starting their own ElderSpirit communities.

"We hope we're like a family," Peterson said. "Everybody gets something out of this."

In fact, community building is the most important aspect of ElderSpirit. When Peterson, Hutson and Rumschlag moved to Abingdon to begin developing the community, the first thing they did was reach out to the people living nearby.

They came to the task with several lifetimes' experience in mission work and community service. Rumschlag, who once ran a bakery as part of a workers co-operative in Big Stone Gap, baked loaves of bread and took them door to door.

While some neighbors worry that ElderSpirit and other developments might bring higher property taxes to Abingdon's older neighborhoods, many are glad to see the new development. DeBose isn't worried about property taxes going up from the new development.

"If taxes do go up, that might make people take better care of their properties," she said.

The Abingdon town council likes the ElderSpirit idea so much it may apply for a community block grant to revitalize another low-income neighborhood across town. If all goes as planned, the town might develop a second ElderSpirit community there.

Anne Glass, the Tech gerontologist, thinks the spiritual aspects of the community may even outgrow the physical development of ElderSpirit.

Some research suggests that older adults who attend church do better emotionally and physically as they face the stresses of aging. The ElderSpirit idea of committing to and practicing a spiritual path could have the same benefits, Glass believes.

Moreover, the spirituality and mutual support aspects of ElderSpirit might be transferred to communities of elderly people who are "aging in place" in their own neighborhoods, apartment complexes or existing nursing homes and retirement centers. This kind of spirituality can give meaning to aging, Glass said.

Recently the mountain sisters gathered to celebrate the second anniversary of Lenore Mullarney's death. They ate a potluck meal, they sang, they prayed. On King's Mountain, backhoes and dump trucks cleared the way for a new community that was tested by her death and will be built in her memory.

Resources, information for seniors, caregivers

www.seniornavigator.com - Searchable database of care facilities and a wealth of other information.

www.agingwithdignity.org - Information on aging and dying with dignity.

www.healthinaging.org / public_education - Site sponsored by the American Geriatrics Society Foundation for Health in Aging offers a useful downloadable book titled "Eldercare at Home."

www.caregiver.org - Site of the Family Caregiver Alliance offers helpful resources and links.

www.centerforloss.com/library/centerforloss/contents.asp - Library of helpful articles on dealing with loss and life transitions.

www.hospicefoundation.org - Site of the Hospice Foundation of America with a useful list of resources and links.

www.elderspirit.net - Information and news about the ElderSpirit community in Abingdon, including a "goodness of fit" questionnaire for those interested in living in the community.

www.cohousing.org - Everything about the co-housing movement.

www.spiritualeldering.org - Information about the "conscious aging" movement.