B.J. Miller was a sophomore at Princeton when, one Monday night in November 1990, he and two friends slipped out for drinks and then decided to climb a commuter train parked at the adjacent rail station, for fun. When Miller got to the top, electrical current arced out of a piece of equipment into the watch on his wrist. Eleven-thousand volts shot through his left arm and down his legs. When his friends reached him on the roof of the train, smoke was rising from his feet.

Miller remembers none of this. His memories don't kick in until several days later, when he woke up in the burn unit of St. Barnabas Medical Center, in Livingston, N.J. Doctors took each leg just below the knee, one at a time. Then they turned to his arm, which triggered in Miller an even deeper grief. For weeks, the hospital staff considered him close to death. But Miller, in a devastated haze, didn't know that. He only worried about who he would be when he survived. For a long time, no visitors were allowed in his hospital room; the burn unit was a sterile environment.

But on the morning Miller's arm was going to be amputated, just below the elbow, he describes a moving scene of support and grace from his community of friends: a dozen friends and family members packed into a 10-foot-long corridor between the burn unit and the elevator, just to catch a glimpse of him as he was rolled to surgery. "They all dared to show up," Miller later said. "They all dared to look at me. They were proving that I was lovable even when I couldn't see it."