Picture me: I'm in the midst of research for a novel in for teens which two very young girls who have been close friends from birth and who are mistaken for each other during treatment after a car accident. This is like, but also very unlike, the recent case of two college young women who were in a similar accident -- and another incident of the same kind happened some years ago.

Their story was the inspiration.

But my story isn't about the mix-up.

It's about how tragedy, and the love that accompanies tragedy, ripples outward and changes the tone of life in an entire community -- for worse AND for better.

Part of the research I needed to do was observation in a Level One Trauma Center (and after a lengthy approval process, I did).

I also visited a rehabilitation unit for people who sustain brain injury after coma. The latter was a place of enormous poignancy, of hope and acceptance, of life promised and life as it actually will turn out to be. By the time a rehabilitation process is completed, most parents, spouses or children have gone through the process of mourning and have accepted that their wives, their babies, their husbands, their siblings will never be the people they were or would have been.

They may live functional, even happy lives with limitations -- but not the lives they once had every right to expect.

As I did this research, I planned for the holidays. Part of every holiday is a traditional visit with one of my (few, and far between) best friends. She is my 11-year-old's godmother; I am godmother to her 20-month-old daughter. Stacey. That's her name. Aunt Stacey to my children, even the grown son.

We have been friends and confidantes for 22 years.

When my husband died from colon cancer, she stood unflinchingly beside me. When SHE learned, at age 32, that SHE had colon cancer, I stood beside her as she -- against amazing odds -- survived Stage Two colon cancer, without chemotherapy.

But Stacey didn't come to our planned coffee that day.

She collapsed at home, when a bothersome strep infection that morphed into pneumonia wracked her always-too-small and delicate body. At the hospital, she was placed on a ventilator; and her lungs responded to treatment. Her befogged state of mind began to clear. She began to shrug off unconsciousness; and because she is a pistol, she began to chafe at her confinement.

I heeded the wishes of her immediate family (who are people I know and love).

In those first days -- dear God -- I stayed away.

I would see her in days to come, when she was better, out of the ICU.

Not quite a week ago, in the wee hours of the morning, Stacey somehow removed her own ventilator. Although the ICU staff knew about this terrible glitch almost immediately, a few hours later, she suffered what probably was a heart attack, for lack of a better way to explain it. She was resuscitated almost immediately. Not two hours later, it happened again. This time, it took some 45 minutes to start Stacey's heart.

Sometimes, the longer it takes, the dicier the outcome.

Perhaps that heroic effort should never have been made. And perhaps it is the most singular gift of her (always against the odds) life.

But the next day, a scan of Stacey's brain showed minimal, if any, activity. A repeat scan the next day showed.. the same thing.

By the time I saw her, she was gnawing at the ventilator and her half-closed eyes were dull. No tears were allowed in her room, by her mom's directive. In my car, I screamed and pounded the steering wheel. Then I went home to tell my 11-year-old daughter the news about her godmother. It felt the way it felt to tell my older sons -- who were then only 9, 6 and 3 -- about their father.

Today, Stacey doesn't look the way she did when I first saw her at the hospital.

An opening in her windpipe meant the vent could be removed, with all its tape and nasty trappings.

She can breathe on her own part of the time. With her hair freshly washed and her pedicure, she looks endearingly, horribly... almost just like herself. Each day her wake and sleep cycles become more regular. Her striking, long-lashed blue eyes are open and clear. Sometimes, they seems to have a puzzled, annoyed expression.

Each day, hope rises. And hope falls.

She doesn't respond to voices or commands, to her name or her to baby's voice.

No one knows if she ever will.

There are few (and far between) stories of awakenings that happen after weeks, months, once in a great while, even years. But no one can cause them to happen. Nothing can be done. No one can intervene. No one knows a way in.

As usual when I write a novel, it seems to take on a life of its own in the universe.

Eight years ago, I wrote about a man I would marry, if I didn't know better: He literally showed up on my doorstep the day the printed books arrived; and we married six weeks later. When I wrote about a contested adoption, my newborn little girl's birthfather came out of nowhere to try to claim her. Because I was already writing about the rules of such a terrifying contest, I knew them all too well. I knew that the odds were stacked high against us; and yet, Mia is here now, fighting with her little brother.

That time, fate smiled.

But in the ICU, where a loss of brain function occurs, miracles are in short supply.

I should be like my friend, Patricia Wood, and write a novel about someone who wins big in the Lottery. I have spent too much time in those places in life where the trap door opens beneath our feet.

If I could write this story, this is what would happen: I would be standing in the room when Stace -- in her dear, low-pitched Ann Southern voice -- would suddenly say, "Jack? Where am I?" I would cry out in rapture; and the 30 people who visit the waiting room (for Stacey is so very beloved) would catapult down the hall to the little curtained alcove where she lies.

It's my story. So I can write it as I choose.

But it is a story.

As usual, I know too much already. Against the happy ending, the odds are stacked, high -- very high. What may have happened is the event hospital personnel fear most: The successful restoration of a young and healthy body with the lights on, and -- so far -- nobody home. This is their immense agony, even as they fight for vital signs, the trepidation that makes every rescue a gamble.

I know everything, and still, in the morning, before am fully awake, I hear the Stacey-voice -- teasing me, telling me, laughing with me ... oh, yes, and telling me what she always said --- that if she didn't have bad luck, she'd have no luck at all.

I cannot tell you what I would give -- a limb certainly, my hair, my hand -- to hear that funny, scratchy little voice once more.

Give me one last chance, Stace.

Give your many other and dearer friends, and your husband, the man who has loved you since he was a boy and you were a girl, and the beautiful daughter you two found and adopted (against the odds, always against the odds) and your elderly parents, your brother and sister -- give all of us one last chance.

I will never break another lunch date because life got "too crazy."

Life was never so crazy that we didn't have time for each other. We simply thought we had all the time there was.

Beautiful dreamer, wake unto me. Let this story have the kind of ending critics have sometimes have accused me of writing into my novels -- the kind that could never happen in real life.

By the way, this novel I'm writing will be called ALL WE KNOW OF HEAVEN, from a line I've always loved from the poetry of Emily Dickinson: 'Parting is all we know of heaven/And all we need of hell"

with friendship,

Jackie M.