WASHINGTON -- Not too long ago, Senator-elect Jean Carnahan read a magazine
article about coping with severe stress, a condition that can strike people
who experience one of the following: the death of a spouse, the death of a
child, the loss of a friend, a move to a new town, a job change.

"And I said, `Oh, my heavens, all these things are happening to me,' " said
Mrs. Carnahan, 66, over a plate of pasta and a cup of tea in the Dirksen
building cafeteria recently. "I should have read the article more closely."

Wherever she goes in the Capitol nowadays, Mrs. Carnahan is celebrated for
her courage and good humor; strangers want to hug her, colleagues want to
share their own misfortune. Recently Senator Edward M. Kennedy handed her a
well-worn copy of a book by his brother John F. Kennedy, "Profiles in Courage."

Three weeks before the election, Senator- elect Carnahan's high school
sweetheart, confidant and husband of 45 years, Gov. Mel Carnahan of
Missouri, died in a plane crash. Her oldest son, Randy, the pilot, died with
him, as did an aide to the governor, Chris Sifford.

Governor Carnahan, a Democrat, was challenging Senator John Ashcroft for his
Senate seat in a hard-fought, often bitter race.

But Mrs. Carnahan had little time to absorb the shock. Just days after she buried
her husband and son, Mrs. Carnahan received a call from the state's new governor,
Roger Wilson, who posed a series of hypothetical questions: Let's say her husband
was elected posthumously, would she be willing to fill the seat?

"I had to think long and hard about it," Mrs. Carnahan said. "I knew it would be quite
a dramatic step for me. And I didn't know whether the people of Missouri would go
to the polls and vote for someone who was dead. There was no one there saying you
ought to do this. In fact, people stayed away from that."

"I almost felt as if my world had come to an end. But I didn't want all the things that Mel
stood for, that we had worked together for, I didn't want those things to die. I didn't want
to feel like I was letting myself down or him down. And the people of Missouri wanted
something to survive that plane crash, as well."

Mrs. Carnahan, a "Jimmy Carter Baptist," as she put it, prayed and consulted
with her children. One pivotal moment, she said, came during an interview
with Cokie Roberts, when Ms. Roberts recounted how her own mother, Lindy
Boggs, coped with the loss of her husband, Hale, who died in a plane crash in 1972.

Still reeling from the loss of her husband, Mrs. Boggs decided to fill her husband's
Congressional seat. This newfound sense of purpose in her mother's life, Ms. Roberts said,
guided her through her grief. "I decided I would just go with my heart and soul and do
what I knew he would want me to do," Mrs. Carnahan said.

With her sweetness and sharp pantsuits, Mrs. Carnahan is the picture of the
modern grandmother, a widow with guts. But she knows she must flesh out the
portrait if she is to be taken seriously as an appointed senator, and be
elected in her own right in two years, when Missouri holds its next general election.

Her presence as a Democrat in a seat formerly held by a Republican is critical to her
party in the evenly divided Senate. But she has met with centrist senators like Democrat
John B. Breaux of Louisiana and Republicans Susan Collins and Olympia J. Snowe of Maine,
and says she plans to work in the middle, listening, and focusing first on education.

Born in Washington on Dec. 20, 1933, Mrs. Carnahan first met her husband at a church youth
group in the early 1950's. Then, thanks to every school's systematic reliance on alphabetical order,
Ms. Carpenter wound up sitting next to Mr. Carnahan at Anacostia High School.

After promising his father he wouldn't marry until graduating from college, Mr. Carnahan
raced through George Washington University in three years. Three days after graduation,
the two were married, and a short while later, Mrs. Carnahan completed her own studies
in business administration at the same university.

The couple had four children, who went on to become four lawyers — "not a
brain surgeon among them," Mrs. Carnahan lamented. As a young wife, Mrs. Carnahan
jumped wholeheartedly into political life, and served as her husband's trusted adviser.
She always wrote her own speeches, and sometimes wrote his.

MUCH of what happened before the election Mrs. Carnahan calls a blur. "I guess I didn't
dare let myself think that it was possible," she said. "We were asking the people of Missouri
to do an awful lot. But I guess I kind of got a feeling that something was happening out there."

She first noticed that "something" the day of her husband's burial, when she set out from
Jefferson City to the family farm in Rolla. Someone whispered to her to hurry up.

"I said, What are you talking about?" she recalled. "He said people are
waiting all along the way. Sure enough, as we started, each town we went
through — there are about four or five towns along the way, and it was
dusk — people were standing there with candles and posters, and they were
singing. It was just a very moving and solemn time. So I could tell this had
affected people in a very deep way."

On election night, Mrs. Carnahan, surrounded by her children and a few of
her husband's former aides, flipped on the television set, for the first
time since her husband's death, to watch the returns.

Her husband had been trailing Senator Ashcroft all evening, and Mrs.
Carnahan said she was going to bed. But several people urged her to stay,
since the vote tally from St. Louis was still out. She sat back down.

"At 12:45 it was officially declared," Mrs. Carnahan said. "My daughter
turned and put her hand on my leg and said, `We've won.' And my son came
over, and we just hugged each other and cried."