"I looked at Patricia and she said, 'I was praying while you were lying on my chest that Taylor would give you a sign that she was here.' And she did. I will never forget that. It was truly the gift of Taylor letting me know she was here." Both tragic and wonderful is the real-life story of 13-year-old Taylor Storch's gift of life to five people, after her own was cut short. Taylor had been on a ski trip with her parents in Colorado when, on the very last run of the day, she hit a tree and was soon after pronounced "brain-dead." No doubt still reeling from the sad events of that day, Taylor's parents were asked if they'd consider donating her organs to save the lives of others. "Taylor was a giving, wonderful person," explained Todd Storch, Taylor's father, on the Today Show. "I looked at Tara, and we knew exactly that's what Taylor would do. She was so giving, and that choice was very, very easy." Taylor's mother, Tara vowed at the time, to hear her daughter's heartbeat once again. Meanwhile, Patricia Winters had been suffering from cardiomyopathy for some five years. The condition left her unable to do much more than sleep for 18 hours-a-day, and made it almost impossible for her to care for her two young sons. But, then she received the call she'd been hoping for, and soon went into surgery for her new heart. Interestingly enough, when Patricia awoke after the operation, she kept asking, "Who is she? Who is she?" Somehow she knew the person whose heart now was beating inside her, was a girl. Although heart recipient's information and donors' families are usually kept confidential, Winters found out whose gift had given her life back. She explained, "A friend of [husband Joe] had sent over the article from Colorado stating that a 13-year-old girl had died in a ski accident and a 39-year-old Arizona woman received her heart, so I put two and two together." Tara Storch, longing to hear her daughter's heartbeat again, began to search for who might have received her heart. Finally, after about six months, the two families connected and met up for the first time. "I asked her, 'Can I just lay my head on your chest and listen?' Taylor and I were very, very close and I would lie in bed with her and just snuggle with her," Tara Storch told Meredith Vieira on the Today Show, recently. "So I got to lay my head on her chest. What was magical was while I was doing that, her heart just had this huge kick. Then Patricia said, 'Did you hear that?' And I said, 'Yes, I did.' "Then it did it again—this huge kick. I looked at Patricia and she said, 'I was praying while you were lying on my chest that Taylor would give you a sign that she was here.' And she did. I will never forget that. It was truly the gift of Taylor letting me know she was here." Source
