Jasta was airlifted by helicopter to Children's Hospital of Philadelphia. Melissa's mother, Donna Daubenspeck, who heard about the accident at 6 a.m., was holding her granddaughter's hand when she died just before noon. Jasta became one of 17,000 Americans who died in alcohol-related crashes that year.

Melissa was taken by ambulance to Frankford Hospital-Torresdale Campus. With Melissa in a coma and the outlook grim, the family discussed whether to remove life support if she didn't get better.

"We talked about it a couple times," said Melissa's brother John. "I said to my mother, 'You have to let her go, because she doesn't want to be a vegetable.' "

After that threat passed, doctors feared she'd be paralyzed from the chest down. But she began moving her legs and toes.

Melissa suffered collapsed lungs, a neck fracture, broken ribs, and a broken leg, but the primary concern was her traumatic brain injury.

Jasta's brain was shaken so hard it killed her. Melissa's nearly so.

After nearly a month in a coma, Melissa regained consciousness. Even before Melissa could speak, still on a respirator, her mother told her about Jasta, that she had died in the crash. Daubenspeck saw tears well in her daughter's eyes.

But what Melissa understood is uncertain. That she didn't remember would become obvious. When she did speak, she told her family she was pregnant, in the hospital to have a baby. She didn't remember she'd already had Jasta.

She also didn't recognize Dan Jones, her boyfriend.

But once she remembered him, she immediately recited his cell-phone number. There was nothing predictable about what she could remember and what she couldn't.

Melissa had forgotten how to feed herself, how to bathe, how to walk, how to control her bladder. She was a child all over again.

Then she would forget

She moved to Magee Rehabilitation Hospital, and as her brain began to heal, Melissa would ask about Jasta. Again and again, her mother would tell her Jasta was dead.

Melissa would cry uncontrollably, devastated.

And then she would forget.

Hours later, or the next morning, she'd ask her mother again, "Where's Jasta?"

"I used to have to tell her 20 times a day that her daughter died," Daubenspeck recalled recently. "And she couldn't remember that. I told her over and over. But then, like, later the same day, she'd say, 'Where is Jasta?' and you'd have to go though the whole story again. There was this fantastic nurse at Magee who would crawl into bed with her because she'd cry herself to sleep."

"It was all new to her each time. I would come home and I was like a zombie, exhausted."

The records from Magee are filled with entries like the following, from therapist Todd M. Lewis: "Melissa continues to have significant memory deficits and thus has episodes where she forgets her daughter has died. She will then recall this and become emotionally overwhelmed."