It was July 3rd, 2009. Bridget Shannon and Shannon Newell, cousins and best friends, were driving home from the Jersey Shore. It was a hot summer day so they drove with the windows down, listening to the finale of Shannon’s favorite musical, The Last Five Years. Bridget texted her sister. She would see her in one hour. Bridget had been visiting Shannon and her family in New Jersey for the past two weeks and Bridget’s family had just arrived to pick them up to take them on the annual family summer vacation. They traveled up Route 55 singing and dancing. Shannon, who had only been driving for a month, looked down to turn up the song "Goodbye Until Tomorrow." She took her eyes off the road. The car drifted over to the rumble strip on the side. Startled by the noise and inexperienced, Shannon grabbed the wheel quickly. She pulled too hard and lost control of the car. They went off the highway, crashing into a tree.
Bridget opened her eyes, glass and branches were everywhere. She could smell pine and sap. The Cheetos they had been eating were all over the car. Her knee hurt. Blood was seeping through her favorite blue sweat pants. She looked over. Shannon was covered in blood and branches, caught between the steering wheel and the tree.
She started to scream.
Shannon and Bridget were born six weeks apart in the summer of 1990. They have been best friends since. Their relationship is hard to define, one that crosses many boundaries. They are more than cousins, almost sisters, but mostly best friends. They share all their secrets and stories and are each other’s most loyal companions. Even though they live 300 miles apart, they make it work. They don’t know any other way. Shannon and her family have spent every Christmas, Thanksgiving, and Easter in Massachusetts with Bridget and their extended family. Bridget and Shannon had visited each other several times a year since they were 12. But birthdays were special, on their birthdays the made a point to be together. So on June 22, 2009, Bridget flew to New Jersey for Shannon’s birthday the next day. When they picked Bridget up at the airport that night Shannon sent Bridget’s mother, her godmother, a text that read “Thank you for Bridgie!” For the next two weeks together like they would have any other summer, hanging out, shopping, swimming, going to walks to Wa-Wa, a sub shop and convenience store in one that Bridget loves but can only be found in the greater New York area. On July 2 they visited a friend on the Jersey Shore. The next day they would start a week of family time with Bridget’s parents and extended family. July 3 came and they got up early to leave. Bridget sent her sister a text that they were leaving. They would be home in an hour, she said.
Bridget was wrong. Shannon never made it home.
“Somebody help. Somebody please help my cousin!” Bridget screamed as loud as she could.
Paula Vivona was driving behind the girls. She and her husband, Mike, saw the accident, and stopped the car. He called 911 . She ran to the car to help. She couldn’t get to the drivers side. She ran to the passenger window, instead, trying to look inside. She saw the wreckage. She was afraid it was bad. She could see a young woman in the car. She was conscious so Paula tried to keep her calm.
“What hurts?” she asked Bridget.
“It’s my knee and my foot,” Bridget answered, her voice shaking in fear. “Shannon won’t answer me.”
“What is your name?” Paula asked.
“Bridget.”
“That’s a beautiful Irish name. I’m Paula. Just stay calm my husband is right there he is calling for help. Help will be here soon, just look at me.”
“Do you have children?” asked Bridget.
“Yes, five teenagers.”
“Well you must be a very good mom,” said Bridget, smiling almost. “I’m sorry that you had to stop, you’re not going to be late for anything right?”
“No hunny, it is perfectly fine, I’m staying right here just keep looking at me.”
Bridget was scared, not for herself but for Shannon. Her pain was excruciating but talking with Paula kept her mind off it. They waited there together for 15 minutes before ambulances and helicopters arrived, sirens on. The rumble of the two helicopters arriving made it hard for them to hear. The New Jersey State Police used the Jaws of Life to cut the door off to get Bridget. She tried to look back, tried to see Shannon but they put Bridget on the stretcher taking her away to the helicopter. She didn’t need a helicopter. She screamed where were they taking Shannon? Was she going to be okay? The helicopter took off and she started to cry for the first time.
On the ground police and EMTs were using the Jaws of Life to cut off the roof trying to reach Shannon. It wasn’t until the police moved Paula away to saw off the door that she let go of Bridget’s hand just like she promised.
As they put Bridget on the stretcher to take her to the medical helicopter, Paula yelled to her. It was drowned out by sound of the helicopters and the voices of the police and EMTs.
“I just didn’t want her to be alone. She was so brave.”
“She is going to be fine,” said the doctor, his glasses thick on his round face. He stood tall when he spoke, sure of what he was saying. “She has a concussion and the knee was very badly cut but she is going to be okay.”
A wave of relief came over the family as they hugged and cried. Their clothes were slept in and didn’t match. They had not showered.
They stood in the hallway outside the trauma room their loved one was in. The trauma center was busy, the security guard told them it was normal for a holiday weekend. People coming in and out, waiting to hear about their loved ones, calling others to tell them of the latest news. It smelt like blood and bleach at Cooper Trauma Center, the biggest emergency room in New Jersey. The hallway was bright between the lights and sun. There was a small waiting room, now overflowing with people. In the waiting room a television played the Jackie Chan, Chris Rock comedy “Rush Hour.” Others stood around and wait for news but they still watch as this family embraces. They watch as a mother, father, and daughter learn about the youngest member of the family, Bridget. Their accents were wrong for the area, thick and harsh with their Rs missing, putting them out of place. They asked the doctor about the driver.
“Which hospital was she taken to? Why didn’t they call her parents?”
The doctors here have very few answers. She is at Kennedy Hospital in Washington Township. A blonde woman in her late 40s is nearby, overhearing. “I don’t mean to eavesdrop but I heard the doctor say Kennedy Hospital,” says the blonde. The family looks at her. “They only take you there for cuts and bruises that isn’t a serious hospital at all.”
Again the family embraces. The mother sobs, the daughter looks around wondering if she can tell her sister right away. The dad thanks the woman, telling her she has no idea what that means to them. At this moment the dad’s phone rings. It is the mother of the girl who was driving the car. He answers, hopeful while the mother and daughter anxiously wait.
“She didn’t make it,” his sister says on the other side of the phone.
His face says it all. He doesn’t need to repeat it for his family.
“No Susie, No.” is all he replies.
The mother gasps in disbelief. The daughter sinks to the floor. The father can barely speak.
“I’m sitting here with her and she is still warm, but she’s gone.”
It is then that the daughter on the floor looks up at her parents, hoping they have the answer and says, “How are we going to tell Bridget?”
Bridget, ready to be released, comes around the corner, pushed in a wheelchair by a nurse. Suddenly it is clear that Bridget is not lucky. Shannon is many things to this family. She is their godchild, their cousin, their best friend, their confidant, their superstar.
Now she is their tragedy.
Bridget’s suffered a concussion and a badly cut up knee. She was released from the hospital after two hours. It was the least of her trauma. The doctors believed Shannon died on impact. In the following days, Bridget did not want to talk about the accident. She just wanted to grieve the loss of her best friend. She knew how close she was to death but she didn’t die.
She was the survivor.
“So many people told me how lucky I was,” explains Bridget. “Who wants to be the kind of lucky that you watch your best friend die?”
Through those days, she told people about the woman at the car window. The one who stayed with her. She could describe her and what she had said. The stranger who stopped, the stranger her parents called an angel.
Four days after the accident Dan and Carolyn Shannon met Paula. The wake for Shannon was at the neighborhood church where she had been a cantor a summer before, Holy Savior in Westmont, New Jersey. People waited in line for over three hours. About two hours into the wake, a man and a woman reached the casket then they turned to Shannon’s parents.
“You don’t know us but we felt like we had to be here. We stopped at the accident.”
They embraced and quickly rushed over to Dan and Carolyn, Bridget’s parents. It was in that instant the Shannon family and the Vivona family would be bound forever.
“We could not thank you enough, you have no idea what it means to us what you did for our Bridgie,” said Dan, tears in his eyes, as he stood with his wife Carolyn and his oldest daughter.
“You have an incredible daughter and I am so blessed that I got to meet her,” said Paula, crying and holding Bridget’s hand.
The families sat together for over an hour exchanging stories about their lives and where they come from. They talked about their love of their hometown baseball teams, Phillies and Red Sox. They talked about the indescribable relationship that Bridget and Shannon had.
“You are our angel,” sobbed Carolyn.
In a church full of mourning there was just a split second of two families celebrating the cousin who lived.
It has been nine months since the accident. Bridget sits at her desk and reads a Facebook message from Paula.
Paula who was a stay at home mom for twenty years was so traumatized that she couldn’t help at the accident she has enrolled herself and her family for EMT courses. Life is for the living, she realized and has since gone back to school to finally get her degree in nursing that she started years earlier.
She writes to Bridget every once in a while to check on her and see how she is doing. It is a wonderful friendship forged in tragedy, and life.
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