She reflects on the pain it would cause her to live without her family and decides she would prefer not to wake from her coma. Mia overhears her grandparents discuss whose responsibility it is to decide whether Mia lives or dies.

She recently applied to Juilliard music school in New York City, which added tension to her and Adam's relationship. Meanwhile, Mia reflects on memories of her family and friends. While her body is in the intensive care unit, Mia observes her grandparents, her best friend Kim, and her boyfriend Adam as they wait and worry in the hospital. Mia is airlifted by helicopter to a hospital in Portland.

Paramedics rush Mia and Teddy to the local hospital, where Mia sees her parents' friend Willow on shift as a nurse. She feels no pain, and wonders if she is dead. After the accident, Mia's body slips into a coma, while her consciousness is able to observe the scene in an out-of-body experience. The family pile into their rusty Buick, planning to go out for a day trip to visit friends and family.Ī road collision kills Mia's mother and father. Mia's brother Teddy and her father, a middle-school English teacher, also have the day off, so her mother takes the day off of work. In Oregon, this small amount of snow is enough to cause school closures. While the novel concludes with Mia choosing life and waking from the coma, it is a difficult choice made only after a serious contemplation of leaving the burden of living behind.If I Stay begins with seventeen-year-old cellist Mia Hall waking to a thin layer of snow on her lawn. The author, Gayle Forman, compresses a lifetime of Mia’s memories into this brief time period, a figurative journey into the most meaningful moments of her past as she battles for life in the present.ĭuring this 24 hour limbo in the hospital, Mia has the power to choose whether to stay or to go-whether to live or to die-and her time is spent on the cusp of mortality, agonizing over whether it is better to live in spite of tremendous suffering and devastating loss, or better to let go of that burden in death. and ending with Mia’s awakening from the coma at 7:16 A.M. The novel is divided by the hours of one 24-hour day, beginning on the snowy morning of the accident at 7:09 A.M. While Mia’s physical body is lying comatose in a hospital bed, Mia’s consciousness is able to leave her body and observe unseen the suffering of her friends, family, and boyfriend as they cope with the possibility of her death and desperately attempt to coax her back to life.

The narrative structure moves back and forth in time between her comatose present and her formative years growing up in a quirky musical family, developing into a gifted and dedicated cellist, meeting her best friend, Kim, and her relationship with Adam, her beloved rock musician boyfriend.

If i stay de gayle forman