(page 2 of 11) Today and over the next four days, The Inquirer will present portraits of people and their families approaching the end of life in different ways. The intensive-care unit offers a hope for recovery, but the price can be a miserable death. Deciding when to surrender can be a torture all its own. Thousands of Americans find themselves in the same position as Mrs. Moore, standing beside a loved one, in intensive care, wondering what's happening, wondering what's the right thing to do. FOR 24 YEARS, Gene Moore had lived in an 18th-century farmhouse in rural Ottsville, Upper Bucks County. From his back porch, he watched the sun set over endless hills. He grew grapes and made wine, shoed horses, and played classical guitar and poker with his grandsons. Every summer he'd go crabbing with the family in Ocean City, Md., and pour on the bay seasoning. He dreamed of buying an RV and roaming the country with his wife and younger son, Ron, 35, who still lived at home. But then his lungs went bad - pulmonary fibrosis. By January, Gene Moore couldn't breathe. Then came the lung transplant in February at the University of Pennsylvania Medical Center. A step from death, he was reborn. He regained enough stamina to walk two miles a day on his treadmill and went to a flea market where he showed strangers the scar - shaped like bat wings - that streaked across his chest. ``One hundred and twenty staples," he would tell them proudly. He bought a 1981 Thunderbird, a lifelong dream, and drove it twice before he found himself back in the hospital in late June. His body had rejected the lungs. On July 7, Gene Moore was wheeled into Penn's medical intensive-care unit - the MICU. He was being kept alive by mechanical ventilator, feeding tube, blood transfusions, blood pressure medicines, steroids, antibiotics. He was heavily sedated. Like many Americans, the Moores believed doctors could save almost anyone, cure almost anything. They had experienced one miracle, the transplant, and expected another. Death was inconceivable. But so was the agony of the MICU - until they lived it. THE MOMENT Mrs. Moore walked through the big double doors into the ninth-floor MICU, she entered a world like no other, a world in which she was a complete stranger. Death was so near, the language of doctors so foreign.         PREVIOUS PAGE RETURN TO BIO NEXT PAGE