That one would've been about how Candy, 64, had been on an organ-transplant list, waiting, with unflagging good humor, for a new liver to replace her own cancerous one.

I'd have written how Candy continued working nearly every day as a beloved teller at Polonia Bank in Spring Garden. She treated the customers like kin and the Fairmount/Spring Garden area like it was her living room. It's where she was born and had raised two kids with her husband, Joe, 67, the owner of Joe and Sylvia's Store.

That's how I met Joe and Candy - through the store, which has been an institution in my Fairmount neighborhood for 50 years. It's one of those wonderful, old, step-down corner places where you can still buy eggs and lunch meat, hand-dipped ice cream and Alberto VO-5. Joe has worked there since he was a kid, though he's been absent of late, recovering from a stroke.

I'd have written that Candy's illness hadn't stopped her from being Joe's nursemaid. Nor from being a caring mom to sons Joey and Tom, and a doting grandmom. Nor a dutiful daughter, sister, aunt and friend to the scores of people whose orbits overlapped hers in a way possible only when you've stayed in one place your whole life.

I would've described her hope as she waited for word that a donor liver had become available.

That call came last Monday. As Candy was wheeled into surgery at Hahnemann, surrounded by a dozen family members, she began to weep.

"She said, 'These are tears of joy,' " recalls Joey. "She felt like a new life was beginning."

Before she kissed everyone goodbye, she told Joey that, when she got home, she'd ask me to write about the miracle of organ donation. She was so moved that one family's loss could become another's hope.

So that's the column I wanted to write: the one where Candy - recovering on the blue sofa in her Fairmount living room - tells me herself how blessed she is to have a renewed life.

Instead, I am writing this column in memory of Candy, whose heart simply stopped beating shortly after her new liver - a beautiful, perfect match - was transplanted inside her.

"We knew the seriousness of the surgery and the risks. But this was her only chance," said Joey yesterday, as the family recovered from Candy's huge viewing and funeral last weekend at St. Francis Xavier Church. "We have no regrets. The liver worked fine. It was her heart that stopped working."

All the Battistellis know of Candy's donor is that he was a 30-year-old male who died of a gunshot wound. If they could, they'd like to thank his loved ones for the gift they gave Candy, and tell them how well they know their pain.

Candy's husband, Joe, would also tell them that Candy herself had been a designated organ donor. Each time she renewed her driver's license, she checked the "organ donor" box, assuming she'd one day be a giver, not a receiver.

"In the last few months, she became kind of a mini-activist," said Joe. "She talked to everyone about organ donation. If she lived, I think she would have gotten involved in letting people know how important it is. Her own experience really brought it home for her."

In lieu of flowers for her funeral, Candy's family requested that donations be made to Hahnemann Hospital's Transplant Unit, where Candy received such compassionate care.

And in lieu of Candy doing her own "mini-activist" work on behalf of organ donation, I'd like to make my own case for the cause so close to her heart.

According to the Gift of Life Donor Program, more than 90,000 Americans are in need of heart, kidney, liver, lung and pancreas transplants. Every day, 18 of these folks die before an organ becomes available.

In this area alone, 5,300 people need organs, and thousands more need corneas, bone and other tissue to repair injured or diseased bones and joints, skin to heal burns and heart valves to replace diseased ones.

Astoundingly, one donor has the potential to save and enhance up to 50 lives and to take up to eight people off the transplant waiting list.

Candy Battistelli was one of those fortunate recipients. She would not want her death from complications to negate that miraculous fact, her sister Juliana Taylor told me yesterday.

"She saw the transplant as her chance, and she was taking it," said Juliana of Candy, who was so loved that nearly 500 attended her viewing last week, standing in the pouring rain for a chance to come inside and say goodbye.

"Her death doesn't change any of that." *

E-mail polaner@phillynews.com or call 215-854-2217. For recent columns:

http://go.philly.com/polaneczky