I don’t know where New York Hospital recruits its staff for the terminal cancer wing, but my guess is somebody in Human Resources hacks into St. Peter’s mainframe and swipes the saint list. The constancy of their compassion and the absolute decency with which they treated me and my family were truly awe-inspiring.

But as I passed forever-smiling Kevin at reception and angelic Sally Hitchens, the head of the Nursing Department, it took everything I had to raise my head and manage a weak nod back at them.

To say I wasn’t feeling very social would have been putting it mildly.

“Oh, look, Tom,” a middle-aged woman, clearly a visitor, said to her husband at the elevator. “A teacher brought some students in to sing Christmas carols. Isn’t that so nice? Merry Christmas, children!”

We get that a lot. I’m of Irish American extraction, but my kids-all adopted-run the gamut. Trent and Shawna are African American; Ricky and Julia, Hispanic; and Jane is Korean. My youngest’s favorite show is The Magic School Bus. When we brought home the DVD, she exclaimed, “Daddy, it’s a show about our family!”

Give me a fuzzy red wig and I’m a six-foot-two, two-hundred-pound Ms. Frizzle. I certainly don’t look like what I am-a senior detective with the NYPD Homicide Division, a troubleshooter, negotiator, whatever’s needed by whoever needs it.

“Do you boys and girls know ‘It Came Upon a Midnight Clear’?” the woman who had latched on to us persisted. I was just about to sharply point out her ignorance when Brian, my oldest son, glanced at the smoke coming out of my ears and piped up.

“Oh, no, ma’am. I’m sorry. We don’t. But we know ‘Jingle Bells.’ ”

All the way up to dreaded Five, my ten kids sang “Jingle Bells” with gusto, and as we piled out of the elevator, I could see a happy tear in the woman’s eye. She wasn’t here on vacation either, I realized, and my son had salvaged the situation better than a United Nations diplomat, certainly better than I ever could have.

I wanted to kiss his forehead, but eleven-year-old boys have killed over less, so I just gave him a manly pat on the back as we turned down a silent, white corridor.

Chrissy, with her arm around Shawna, her “best little pal” as she calls her, was into the second verse of “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” as we passed the nurses’ station. The little ones could have been life-size Precious Moments figurines in their dresses and pigtailed hair, thanks to the extreme makeover work of their older sisters, Juliana and Jane.

My kids are great. Amazing, really. Like everyone else lately, they had gone so far above and beyond that it was hard to believe sometimes.

I guess it just pissed me off that they had to.

At the end of the second hallway we turned, a woman, wearing a flowered dress over her ninety-pound frame and a Yankees cap over her hairless head, was sitting in a wheelchair at the open door of 513.

“MOM!” the kids yelled, and the thunder of twenty feet suddenly shattered the relative silence of the hospital hall.

THERE WAS HARDLY enough of my wife left to get twenty arms around, but the kids managed it somehow. There were twenty-two arms when I got there. My wife was on morphine, codeine, and Percocet, but the only time I saw her completely pain-free was that first moment when we arrived, when she had all her ducklings pressed around her.

“Michael,” Maeve whispered to me. “Thank you. Thank you. They look so wonderful.”

“So do you,” I whispered back. “You didn’t get out of that bed by yourself again, did you?”

Every day when we came to see her, she was dressed for company, her intravenous pain pack hidden away, a smile on her face.

“If you didn’t want glamour, Mr. Bennett,” my wife said, fighting the weariness in her glazed eyes, “I guess you should have married someone else.”

It was the morning of the previous New Year’s Day when Maeve had complained about some stomach pain. We’d thought it was just some holiday indigestion, but when it hadn’t gone away in two weeks, her doctor wanted to do a laparoscopy just to be on the safe side. They found growths on both ovaries, and the biopsy came back with the worst news of all. Malignant. A week later, a second biopsy of the lymph nodes they took out with her uterus reported even worse news. The cancer had spread, and it wasn’t going to stop.

“Let me help you up this time, Maeve,” I whispered as she started to push herself up out of the chair.

“You want to get seriously hurt?” she said, glaring at me. “Mr. Tough Guy Detective!”

Maeve fought for her life and dignity like a banshee. She took on cancer the way the outclassed Jake LaMotta took on Sugar Ray Robinson in the fifties, with an epic ferocity not to be believed.

She was a nurse herself and used every contact and every ounce of wisdom and experience she’d gained. She underwent so many chemo and radiation treatments, it put a life-threatening strain on her heart. But even after the radical attempts, after everything there was to be done had been done, the CAT scan revealed growing tumors in both lungs, her liver, and her pancreas.

A quote from LaMotta rang in my ears as I watched Maeve stand on her wobbling toothpick legs to prop herself up behind her wheelchair. “You never knocked me down, Ray,” he supposedly said after Robinson TKO’d him. “You never knocked me down.”

MAEVE SAT DOWN on the bed and lifted a white chart from beside her.

“I got something for you, guys,” she said softly. “Since it looks like I’m going to be stuck here in this ridiculous place for a while longer, I decided I needed to come up with a list of chores for you.”

Some of the older kids groaned. “Mom!”

“I know, I know. Chores. Who needs them?” Maeve said. “But here’s my thinking. If you all work together, you can keep the apartment running for me until I get back. Okay, team? Then here we go. Julia, you’re on lifeguard duty for baths for the youngin’s, and you’re also responsible for getting them dressed in the morning.

“Brian, you’re my cruise director, okay? Board games, video games, Duck, Duck, Goose. Anything you can think of that’s not the TV. I need you to keep all the young men as occupied as possible.

“Jane, you’re on homework patrol. Get the house genius, Eddie, to help you. Ricky, I hereby dub you the Bennett house personal lunch chef. Remember, peanut butter and jelly for everyone except Eddie and Shawna-they get baloney.

“Let’s see. Fiona and Bridget. Table setting and clearing. You could alternate, figure it out…”

“What about me?” Trent squeaked. “What’s my job? I don’t have a job yet.”

“You’re on shoe patrol, Trent Bennett,” Maeve said. “All I ever hear from these complainers is ‘Where’s my shoes? Where’s my shoes?’ Your job is to gather up all ten pairs and get them next to everybody’s bed. Don’t forget your own.”

“I won’t,” Trent said, nodding with five-year-old intensity.

“Shawna and Chrissy, I have a job for you girls, too.”

“Yay,” Chrissy said, and did a little ballerina twirl. She’d gotten the Barbie of Swan Lake DVD for her birthday a month before, and every emotion now came with an impromptu interpretive dance.

“You know Socky’s dish in the kitchen?” Maeve said.

Socky was a fickle white-and-gray cat that Maeve had pulled out of the garbage alongside our West End Avenue apartment house. My wife obviously has a thing for the misfortunate and strays. The fact that she married me proved that a long time ago.

Shawna nodded solemnly. At four, she was the quietest and most obedient and easygoing of all my kids. Maeve and I used to laugh at the nature-versus-nurture debate. All ten of our kids came from the womb prepackaged with his or her own personality. A parent could enhance and certainly damage, but change? Make a quiet kid gabby or a social butterfly more cerebral? Uh-uh. Not gonna happen.