Starting with the historiographical assumption that hospices for the elderly, as created in the nineteenth century, are waiting rooms for death, this article argues that dying at the hospice is indeed a unique end-of-life experience but that this experience contradicts how contemporary attitudes towards death are commonly analyzed. Living at the hospice meant living and dying under supervision and among other assisted people. Far from being silenced or hidden, the end of life of elderly Parisians was planned on the day they entered the institution and usually happened in public. Deprived of the freedom to make a will, the poorest of those under public assistance also risked ending up dissected in one of Paris’ medical auditoriums. Since the preparation for their death was an oppressive experience for the elderly at hospices, it became a political fight carried by associations of pensioners. As an issue of public concern in the second half of the nineteenth century, the right to choose one’s heirs and end of life arrangements found support more quickly in newspapers and among politicians than it was actually enacted in public assistance practices. This article will shed light not only on how the interpretation of hospices as a stagnant place of death is simplistic, but also on the fact that the elderly of the working classes in the nineteenth century had vibrant agency and the capacity to mobilize.