The alternative ending to my article, "A Prayer Before Dying":

WHAT HER DEATH WOULD BE LIKE
IF TIME WENT BACKWARDS:

Her doctor friends called it ‘a fast die.’ Her death followed only 111 days after her diagnosis, too brief for anyone who loved her to acclimate to the new reality. The time for miracles had run out on Elisabeth Targ. 

Or had it? Targ loved the interplay between life and death, between conscious and unconscious, awake and asleep. Her husband tape recorded many sessions of her talking to him as she fell asleep and lost coherence. Now and then she got glimpses of her future, and she played with being able to alter future events telepathically. Targ believed that sometimes, effects could come before their causes.

So maybe she chose to experiment with the moment of her death. Maybe she chose to experience her death backwards, in order that the miracle she’d been praying for came true after all. If so, it would have been something like this:

Friday morning, the coroner’s van came backwards up the switchback road from Portola Valley. The men got out, and walking backwards they carried her on a stretcher. They brought her in the house and placed her on her bed. Then they drove away, backwards.

Even in death she was beautiful. Placid. Do you dare take pictures of the dead? Her friends put the exposed film back in their cameras and popped their flashes, so that the negative images on the film disappeared. They wanted this moment uncaptured. They circled her in prayer for an hour. Some members of the family didn’t understand why they didn’t call the coroner to remove her body. The sun went down around 6 a.m., and the rest of the night was hard on her husband Mark. The long wait. Mark called friends and wept. He lay beside her body on the bed and held Elisabeth in his arms. He looked at his watch, the ticking hands sweeping counterclockwise. It was 11:11 pm on July 18, 2002, and that very minute, miraculously, Elisabeth Targ’s inert, curled-up body began to breathe. She breathed hard. Hyperventilating, her lungs struggling for air. Mark held her in his arms as she came alive. Her lungs were going nuts. Finally, after about half an hour, they got the hang of it and calmed. Her friends waited patiently. And there it was. An eye blink. A hand squeeze! Two of them. She would make it.

After a few weeks, she was well enough to go to the hospital. No doctor had ever seen a brain tumor shrink this fast. An MRI showed the cancer was still extremely invasive, but eight days later another MRI showed it had retreated back to just the left side of her brain. In six hours of surgery they removed a chunk of the tumor, and then they replaced the hole they’d cut in her skull and reattached all her hair. The hospital told her to bring her boyfriend in when she called to get the results. Then one morning, she looked in the mirror, and the left side of her face was no longer slack, and the next day she was able to pronounce the letter ‘B’ again. Maybe she was cured by her prayers that she was pregnant. or cured probably by the implant of fertilized eggs in her uterus. They harvested the unfertilized eggs, and then they jacked her up on hormones. She’d always wanted a family. But there was never enough time. Now there would be 40 years of life left. She knew this with a certainty she could not explain.”