Maggie Worthen, rather than bounding from her dorm room that May day in search of friends for a few final days of bonding, rather than preparing to celebrate and accept graduation good wishes and presents on May 21, rather than wearing a black graduation robe along with her college classmates, was rushed to the UMass Medical Center, Worcester, not talking, not breathing on her own.

No one knows how much time passed before she was discovered and taken to the hospital. When Smith College telephoned her emergency family contacts, her father Paul was at his South County home. Her mother Nancy had recently finalized plans to move to Providence where she would be closer to her new job, and had just departed on a trip overseas.

It would take many phone calls to find Nancy, to arrange for her return, from Paris to London, from London to Boston, from Boston to her daughter.

It was a time when all the information her mother had was that her daughter had suffered a stroke.

“Maybe you should wait until you get to the hospital,” Nancy’s friend Dorothy Devine, of South Kingstown, Maggie’s godmother, told her in attempting to convey conflicting information from Worcester.

But during a stopover in London, Nancy made a telephone call to the Massachusetts hospital where her daughter had been admitted. What she discovered was that the healthy girl she left behind for a few days, before expecting to meet up with her again at graduation, had stopped talking, seeing, laughing, walking, running, smiling.

Her mother wanted to know: Could they save her?

“Several doctors told me to let her go,” said Worthen, who, divorced since Margaret was 9 years old, arrived at a hospital where in her absence, Maggie’s father and Nancy’s friends had already gathered to lend the support she would dearly need.

“One doctor told me that the best prognosis he had for her was that she would be in a perpetual vegetative state. Take her off life support, they said.”

That’s what they would do if it were their daughter, Worthen said they told her.

“I argued with that doctor. It doesn’t matter what you think you’d do,” she told them. “I only have one person to consider.”

Worthen has considered that one person these six months hence during every waking moment.

While she had prided herself on giving her daughter choices throughout her young life, Worthen knew that she would have to make this serious choice for her daughter: To keep her alive by whatever means possible.

“We decided it was right to give her every opportunity. She would do everything for me. She wouldn’t have let me go. She would have said, ‘We’re fighting,’” Worthen said.

“I’m going to make the decision that she would want to fight. I guess there’s that fierce mother love.”

That very same love is what has kept her afloat during the ordeal that has taken the family to a multitude of doctors, hospitals, waiting rooms, many miles in one direction, many miles in another, all the while maintaining hope.

Hope that her daughter will recover. That she’ll live an independent life. That she’ll come back. Say a word. One word.

Any word.

“I really don’t know. I have to plan for her future. If she wakes up, she might have physical difficulties. Her eyesight might be affected.”

But on the other hand, “If she wakes up, she might be able to think. For me, that’s the most important thing. It’s an unknown. There’s no way of knowing until she wakes up,” said Nancy.

There have been signs. She has responded to some commands, say both her mother and her father. There have been moments when she opened and fluttered her eyes.

Maggie’s parents take turns visiting, reading to her, playing music. Family friends and college friends visit, too, doing some of the same.

Her father has been reading Lonesome Dove to her because “she had borrowed it from me and was going to read it after she graduated,” said Paul Worthen, who now lives in Charlestown.

Maggie’s godmother, Dorothy visits and sings “old Methodist hymns, which is really crazy because I have a terrible voice. I’ll massage her hands, I’ll spend all day there. When I leave, I weep.”

Devine tells of the circle of friends that includes Nancy and Maggie Worthen, and how when gathering with the same friends for different events, Maggie would make sure that everyone – most importantly, a young friend with Down’s syndrome – was included.

“At every single party, she would play cards or something with him. That’s her character. And he adored her.”

Not having children of her own, Devine said Maggie is something of the daughter she never had.

“I watched her grow up and I would go to things. I went to see her play Auntie Mame, and she was fabulous. She was tall and slender and didn’t wear a lot of makeup and had the same boyfriend since high school. He loves her deeply and goes to see her every Wednesday.”