Brief

After dying from Carbon Monoxide poisoning in her car, Cindy goes to Heaven, where she converses with Jesus. Jesus agrees to give her more time on Earth, and she is resuscitated. Cindy struggles to recover from her accident – she can no longer write or drive, she has forgotten how to use grammar and do math, and she has lost many memories. But she holds onto her faith in Jesus and works to achieve her dreams and spread love.

What We Liked

This is an inspirational, moving story that will restore faith in those who are having doubts. Cindy is a loving Christian woman who overcomes tremendous hardship to achieve her dreams and make the most of her time on Earth. The lessons about overcoming challenges, supporting friends and family, loving each other, and maintaining faith will resonate with religious Christian viewers, and it is impossible not to empathize with Cindy. It is a story that will provide peace to those who fear death or who have recently lost loved ones and need to cope.

Film: Viewers who want to see a concise, inspirational story that will transform their conception of life and death would love to see this film. The themes of overcoming challenges, maintaining faith through hardships, and the importance of memory and love are all ones that would resonate with audiences. The inciting incident – Cindy's near death experience – would keep viewers hooked, and the structure of the book would be easily adaptable to the big screen.

TV: This story spans Cindy's life, beginning with her birth (and her pointy baby head) and ending with her in the present day in her 60s. There is a lot of great content in her life that could lead to a series – her childhood, her accident, her recovery, her college experience, her marriage, her children, her second accident, and her chance encounter with Prince Charming. Developing this inspirational story for TV could allow viewers the chance to see Cindy's life in detail and will allow her message about maintaining faith to resonate strongly.

Key points:
Active, likable female lead; Near Death Experience; Close-knit family; Based on a true story; Powerful themes.

Synopsis

CINDY BARRY wrote this story about her own life. She grows up as the youngest of four children in a safe, small town in Texas with loving parents. Her whole family is Christian and religious. In 1972, she is 19 years old and doing very poorly in college. Her parents switch her from a large university to a smaller one, and because her roommate CATHY is planning on becoming a healthcare worker, Cindy is inspired and wants to pursue that career path as well. As she is driving home for Thanksgiving, her car gets stuck on a rock, and her friends help her move it off. When she is back at college, she starts getting terrible headaches. One night driving back to her apartment, she falls asleep at the wheel as she is pulling into the parking lot of her building, and her car crashes into a fence. She remains unconscious, suffering from carbon monoxide poisoning. A security guard approaches the car and rescues her, resuscitating her with CPR. An ambulance takes Cindy away, and doctors realize that Cindy has incredibly high levels of carbon monoxide in her body and do their best to treat her.

Cindy writes about how she died that night and went to Heaven. She describes Heaven as a lush, wonderful place, and she sees her GRANDFATHER, who has passed away. Jesus tells her that he wasn’t expecting her so soon, and she asks him to let her go back down to Earth and spread love; she wants to have a husband and children. He lets her go, but not before she sees her initials being inscribed in the Book of Life as C.S., though her initials are C.B. She wakes up tied to a hospital bed and is told that she is lucky to be alive. Miraculously, the poisoning only affected one side of her brain, the memory side.

She stays in the hospital being treated for months, and when she goes home, she struggles to regain her memories. The first year of recovery is exceptionally challenging – she is in and out of hospitals, has huge gaps in her memory, frequently acts out of character because of the brain damage, and is in pain. But she remembers that Jesus is with her, and she maintains her faith.

After she is mostly recovered, Cindy goes back to college with Cathy. One night, they all go out to celebrate a friend’s birthday, and Cindy gets unintentionally drunk. She wakes up naked in a man’s bed and is horrified, but he is kind and tells her that her friends showered her after she vomited last night and left her sleeping in his bed. Cindy is touched by this man’s kindness, and she starts referring to him as PRINCE CHARMING. They get to know each other, and she helps him decide to join the army so that he can go to college for free and become a doctor. She is upset when he leaves for the army, since she feels like they might be meant to be, but she channels the kindness and love she felt from him into all of her future relationships. Shortly after, she meets DAVID, who is working as a carpenter to put himself through college so he can become an architect, and he treats her like a princess. They get married and her initials become C.S., just how they were written in the Book of Life.

Cindy has her son WILL and then her son LOGAN two years later. She and her husband build their dream home on a lake. She has a terrible fall one day but manages only to shatter her heel bones and not break other bones, which is a miracle. She regains her ability to walk and do almost everything after a recovery period that lasts for several months.

After her children have grown up and she has been married to David for over 30 years, things start getting worse. David isn’t showing her affection or putting work into the marriage anymore, and it is deeply hurting her. She tries to fix things but feels like the effort is very one-sided. She comes into some money after her parents pass away and buys a new car and schedules a doctor’s appointment for herself to get plastic surgery. To her surprise, the doctor who owns the office she goes to is Prince Charming, who she hasn’t seen in 40 years. She is crushed when he denies knowing who she is. She is certain that he remembers her and is lying, but she isn’t sure why. Then she remembers that they may have met up after his army service, but her memory problems are still an issue, and she can’t remember the details except that she saw him by chance at a Polka Dance in 1977. Prince Charming performs plastic surgery on her, and she feels and looks younger after. Years later, she is baptized again, since she cannot remember the first time she was baptized (or if she even was baptized). She continues to live her life knowing she has lots of love in it and that Jesus is by her side, getting her through it all.

About The Author

Cindy Barry Strobel had a near death experience – she suffered from carbon monoxide poisoning, went to Heaven, saw her dead Grandfather, conversed with Jesus, and then asked Jesus if she could return to Earth and continue to spread love. This book documents the inspirational story of this woman who maintained faith through the darkest of times and overcame tremendous hardships.