"I was willing to do anything and try anything," she says.

Kathryn O'Bara had been Mejia's kindergarten teacher. She had heard of Edwarda's healing powers and felt the urge to visit -- the start of a friendship that lasted until Kathryn died.

"The feeling of peace and love in the room was so profound," she says.

In the months that followed, doctors told Mejia her daughters no longer suffered from cystic fibrosis, something the mother chalks up to the miracle of Edwarda. Touched by what happened, Mejia helped Kathryn tend to Edwarda for years.

"There were many miracles that came," Mejia says. "We don't always get a perfect package but we always get a perfect soul."

A woman from South America once visited. Chaykin said she'd been diagnosed with an inoperable brain tumor, traveled to Massachusetts for a second opinion and stopped at the O'Baras' while flying back home. She prayed at Edwarda's bedside.

"About six or nine months later, a truck pulled up with new furniture for the whole downstairs with a note saying, 'I just got back from my doctor and the tumor I had is gone,'" Chaykin says.

"Those things happened all the time."

Adds Mejia, "That was the freaky part. People came from everywhere. Why would it draw them? ... It's a mystery of faith."

A devout Catholic, Kathryn told people that caring for her daughter was a blessing from God.

Yet she could also muster a joke about its physical toll. "If I could turn myself in and get some new parts, I'd be all right," she once told the Miami News.

The family fell into mountains of debt. Joe began painting homes and fixing motor boat engines for extra cash to supplement his teaching income. But the pain -- both financial and emotional -- was too much for the Navy tough guy, who died in 1976.

"No question that it contributed to the father's death," says Chaykin.

Colleen gave up her dream of college to help her family pay their debts.

Already shattered by her sister's condition, Colleen's pain deepened with the death of her father.

She wondered: What type of cruel God would torture a family so?

The power of two words

Mom never lost faith.

She rarely left her daughter's side, let alone the house. On Mother's Day in 1982, Kathryn had a heart attack as she watched Edwarda sleep. She was hospitalized for 10 days, the first time she'd been away from Edwarda overnight in 12 years of caring for her.

Among those who covered the story was Miami Herald columnist Charles Whited. He first met the family in the years after she fell into the coma. He'd write a column around the holidays of a mother who refused to give up on her daughter.