If I Stay

Mia wanders the hospital corridors outside the ICU, eavesdropping on assorted family members in the waiting room. She overhears her aunts, Kate and Diane, discussing someone who escaped the accident with only a few minor cuts and bruises. Initially, Mia thinks they are referring to Teddy; however, she soon learns that they are talking about Mr. Dunlap, the truck-driver who was the other party in the accident. Like Mia, his life will be irrevocably altered by this experience. According to Mia’s aunt, he was not responsible for the accident, but will nonetheless have to live with its outcome. Mia wishes she could go to him and relieve him of the guilt he must be carrying.

Continuing to search the hospital for Adam, Mia finds him with Kim on the trauma floor; the two are hatching a plan to gain access to Mia in the ICU. They search the hospital closets hoping to find uniforms to wear as disguises that will allow them to sneak their way in to Mia’s room. 

While Mia’s grandparents could and probably would help him get access, Adam loves the “grand gesture” (122) and seems determined to solve this problem on his own. Though their plots to gain access are a flurry of comedic film clichés, these ideas allow Adam to focus on something other than the horrible tragedy of the accident and Mia’s coma. In addition, it allows him to bond with Kim, making them real friends for the first time. 

When Adam’s first plan fails, he comes up with a new one, and the first scene of the chapter ends with Adam urging Kim to follow him so that he can reveal the details of his new plan.

This plotting triggers another of Mia’s memories. In eighth grade, Mia had grown tired of the solitude engendered by playing and practicing the cello. She considered quitting the instrument altogether for a new one, a guitar, bass or drums. But, thanks to Kim’s intervention, she does not quit. Kim helps Mia realize that the instrument is a part of her, and that the time she devotes to perfecting her craft is worth it. When Mia complains about how uncool and boring the cello can be, Kim reminds her of the cellist who accompanied Nirvana during their legendary MTV Unplugged performance of “Something in the Way” (128). No one who saw that performance could have thought the cellist was not cool or was not having an extraordinary time performing with one of the world’s biggest bands in one of their seminal performances. 

Kim’s encouragement does not stop there. She also urges Mia to attend a Summer Musician’s Camp in British Columbia called the Franklin Valley Conservatory. Mia ends up attending the camp, and although the food is terrible and the camp itself is rustic and remote, the experience is groundbreaking for Mia. She not only meets other gifted musicians her own age, but must play in ensemble orchestras with them, competing for the camp’s top honor, the right to play the solo at the final performance that concludes the camp.

Adam’s plan turns out to epitomize his flair for the dramatic. He enlists a famous rock star, Brooke Vega, whom his band was supposed to open for at a regional concert, to distract the hospital staff while he sneaks in to see Mia. While Brooke attracts a lot of attention and admiration from several of the staff, the stunt fails and the Senior Nurse calls hospital security to arrest Adam. Fortunately, Willow appears to rescue Adam. Willow, a nurse, has a close relationship with a powerful administrator at the hospital, and she calls in a favor to circumvent the vindictive Senior Nurse’s authority and allow Adam to visit Mia. 

While Willow’s presence initially lifts Mia’s spirits, the fact that she is not with Teddy spells further tragedy. If Willow is visiting her and not Teddy, it suggests that her beloved little brother is dead. 

The realization that Teddy is dead sparks Mia’s memories of his birth. Teddy’s birth involved a hippie midwife at a birth center that looked more like a private home than a hospital. When Mia’s mom went into labor, she shouted for music, but instead of playing something tasteful, the midwife offers to play Enya, a suggestion that is immediately rejected by Mia’s mom. 

Into this scene arrives Henry, who is Willow’s husband and Mia’s father’s best friend. Unlike Mia’s father, it took Henry much longer to grow up and accept marriage and family. At the time of Teddy’s birth, Henry was shocked that Mia’s father was having a second child. Henry arrives at the birth center with food from Taco Bell at the behest of Mia’s father. Henry reveals to Mia that her father was a nervous wreck during her birth and that he cried like a baby after she was born. 

Mia’s father is once again a jangle of nerves at Teddy’s birth, unable to stomach the drama of the delivery room. Because Mia’s father is squeamish, he declines the midwife’s invitation to cut Teddy’s umbilical cord. Instead, the job goes to Mia.

Mia goes on a desperate search for Teddy, even though her intuition tells her that he is probably dead. She pictures herself nuzzling his head full of blonde curls, a gesture of affection they often shared. Mia realizes that she will never be able to do this again, and this realization triggers a flood of “nevers” for Teddy. Dead at the age of seven, Teddy will never be able to experience the joys and rites of passage that life offers. Mia not only grieves for his death, but for the life that he never got to live.

Overcome with pain at the realization of Teddy’s passing, her emotional distress causes her physical condition to deteriorate rapidly. As she stares down at her physical body in the hospital bed, angry and sad simultaneously, her life support monitors begin to sound an alarm. Her blood pressure and pulse drop rapidly and she devolves into a Code Blue Trauma, necessitating another emergency operation to stop what appears to be internal bleeding. 

The medical staff gathers around Mia to begin life-saving measures. One of the doctors, flipping through her chart refers to her body as “a train wreck” (163), prompting an ugly glare from the kind and empathetic Nurse Ramirez.

Nurse Ramirez not only helps to adjust Mia’s tubes, but makes sure that her gown is fully buttoned before the orderlies rush her away on a gurney for emergency surgery. Before they wheel her away, Nurse Ramirez taps her three times on the forehead as if she is trying to communicate with her in Morse code. 

Mia is starting to grasp the correlation between her emotional state and the health of her physical body. While she did not literally will a blood vessel to burst, the overwhelming pain of Teddy’s loss and the difficulty of surviving without her immediate family have a tangible impact on her physical health. 

Mia’s life before the accident had been relatively free of loss and death. Prior to the accident, she had attended her Great-Aunt Glo’s funeral, attended a memorial for Peter Hellman, a trombonist from her conservatory camp, and a funeral for Kerry Gifford, a musician friend of her parents, who succumbed to a freak aneurism at a relatively young age while doing the sound for a Portland concert. 

Kerry’s funeral was a conventional Christian affair organized by his estranged family, who did not support Kerry’s musical career. Unsurprisingly, the funeral is strikingly out of touch with Kerry’s personality, beliefs, and personal preferences. The music includes “Wind Beneath My Wings,” a song that the off-beat and tasteful Kerry would have detested, and the Christian trappings of the ceremony do not jibe with Kerry’s professed atheism. In the car on the way home, Mia’s mom and Henry seem disgusted by the funeral, calling it a “charade” (170) that seems to “repudiate” (170) Kerry’s life and personal choices rather than honoring them. This prompts Henry to make a recommended playlist for his own funeral. 

Henry’s request sparks a lively discussion among the musicians in the car about their own ideal funerals and funereal set-lists. Mia’s mom expresses her personal wish that she and her husband die “quickly and simultaneously at the age of 92” (173), a wish that is partially granted by the circumstances of the car accident. When they die, she wants Mia, who she predicts will be playing for the New York Philharmonic at that point, to play at their funeral.