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of support. Her partner, Julie, was trying to survive a bone marrow transplant, and her course was perhaps the rockiest of all the ICU patients whose families I met during my stay there at the Brigham. In the waiting room large flocks of women held hands, lit candles, and prayed together. Their community was not restricted to the confines of the ICU walls either. They had designed a web page to update their circle as to Julie’s condition. Friends and family could post photos and share memories about Julie, all of which gave Maura great comfort. She would read long passages aloud, laughing or crying in turns.
    Not all the waiting room activity was maudlin. At one point a young hockey player was admitted next door to Neil: another head injury. He had brought a cheering college ice-skating rink to silence when he fell to the ice after a body check and did not rise or even move. He was collared and stretchered like Neil and brought here to the ICU, where now his friends in the waiting room gathered in terrified hugging packs. But the next day the danger was over—he had opened his eyes. He knew his mom. His spine wasn’t broken—and the tears turned to cheers; the hugs turned to chest and fist bumps.
    One time a handful of brawny boys, friends of another accident victim, decided to rearrange the waiting room furniture. They stacked end tables on top of one another to make more room and turned a couch to face kitty-corner instead of against the long wall. I watched Alice and Maura for signs of irritation or impatience, but there was none. That’s the other thing tragedy does: puts things in perspective. None of us were sweating the small stuff anymore. I even found the boys’ youthful cheeriness an uplifting distraction from my own constant worry.
    While Maura used her turn at the computer to update friends about her partner’s progress and gather family support, Saul and I used ours to keep updated about Trista’s condition and the charges facing the drunk driver. By now we were all over the news, with names and photos. No one knows how the news outlets got hold of the photo that ran everywhere. It was taken at Trista’s semiformal. Trista wore a shimmering blue gown and an even brighter smile. Neil’s haystack of unruly hair sprang out from under his favorite top hat as he grinned into the camera. At first the local newspaper listed both kids’ conditions as “extremely serious,” leaving me some scant hope that Trista would make it. But her eyes with their fixed and dilated pupils had told me differently.
    Mary called us often during that first night and the following day, checking on Neil’s condition, updating us on Trista’s. I was so impressed with and grateful for her tremendous generosity of spirit. For her to think of my child as hers lay dying was benevolent beyond words.
    The Zincks ultimately made the terrible, beautiful decision to take their daughter off life support and donate her organs. It was the day after the crash. It was the day of Neil’s surgery. I thought about it often: Neil was being intubated for his surgery as Trista was being extubated for hers. We were being told Neil was “gonna be just fine.” Trista was being declared dead. Neil’s surgeons were opening his leg to repair his broken bones. Trista’s surgeons were opening her so that others might live. Each was lying on an operating room table in the same city. Two different Boston hospitals. Two different teams of doctors. Two very different fates. I imagined their two souls mixing in that sweet unconscious space. It gave me some measure of comfort over the following days and weeks to think about that: Neil and Trista, somewhere together, in spirit and unconsciousness.

    The phone in the waiting room should have been our lifeline. It was, after all, how the nurses taking care of our son communicated with us. But from day one I disliked that thing. Even though I had been a nurse and was now a doctor and knew the rules of the ICU