The full miracle.

That’s what my friend Melissa said she wanted. In fact, she said it was all she would accept. And I understood. I did. What good is half a miracle or one-third of a miracle; when the complete equation is a human life?

What good to clear the infection with antibiotics at the expense of her liver?

What good to clear the lungs with steroids if they will simply fill with fluid again once the chemo begins?

Melissa appeared on my doorstep one Saturday night in September; face pale, eyes red. It was an unexpected visit.

“May I come inside and splash some water on my face before I go home?”

I took her into my bedroom and closed the door. We sat on the bed and she told me that it was not good.

“Not good,” she said.

Her daughter could not breathe on her own. The lungs simply couldn’t fill. The doctors didn’t know why. Was it an infection? A fungus? Fluid? Fibrosis?

A biopsy would tell them.

Maybe.

We had left the world of protocols and structure and entered the world of Maybe. Ever since the relapse. Ever since we all had to accept that the bone marrow transplant had not worked. Ever since the doctors had told Melissa and Dan, “We just don’t know.”

So we sat for a while on my bed that night, and she cried. I had never seen her cry before. Not once in the entire nine months since the diagnosis.

“I just don’t want her to suffer,” she whispered.

And I told her gently but insistently that I perceived a difference between suffering and fighting. And that this was still a fight.

I believed that. It was true, then.

Several weeks later, we sat together on yet another Saturday evening and talked. And it was then that she announced her want for the “full miracle.”

So I pondered that, because it’s what I do, after all. I pondered it through the rest of the weekend, as I went about my life. I pondered it as I ran and biked and cooked and cleaned and wrote about other things. Things that don’t matter, really. Like natural gas and gift baskets and money.

I pondered it one, final time when I bent to kiss that precious girl’s forehead and tell her good-bye.

That was when I realized that Melissa had received the full miracle.

And her name was Natalia.