SHANNON M. THOMPSON - 16 yo (2009) - Waquoit/Falmouth MA

On this same day last year, sometime in the early evening,
16-year-old Shannon M. Thompson, then a sophomore at Falmouth High
School, ran down the stairs of her father’s Waquoit home to the front
door, turning around to look up to her father, Kevin D. Thompson,
before she said the following words: “Hey, Dad, I love you.”
“I said, ‘I love you, too, honey’ and then she went out the door,”
Mr. Thompson said. “She was leaving to go with her boyfriend to give
him a rose. It was his birthday present.”
Those were the last words Shannon would ever say to her father. A
little while later, while a passenger in her boyfriend’s car, Shannon
lost her life in a single-car accident on Currier Road in East Falmouth
after the vehicle she was in struck a utility pole near the
intersection of Route 151.
The day before, Shannon and her mother, Patricia A. Heywood of East
Falmouth, had been discussing the future, but in an instant those
dreams were erased.
“I remember a conversation we had that she had just struck up out of
the blue,” Ms. Heywood said, her voice cracking with emotion. “She
asked me when I wanted to be a grandmother and I told her about 12 to
15 years after she goes to all her colleges, finds a nice man, has a
house, and then I said, ‘I’ll be retired by then and watch your kids.’
She said, ‘You would do that for me?’ and I said, ‘Absolutely.’ And she
said the same thing, ‘I love you, momma.’ That was our last
conversation.”
A year later the pain of the past year has yet to subside for Mr. Thompson and Ms. Heywood.
The news of Shannon’s death was delivered by two Falmouth police
officers who first knocked on Mr. Thompson’s door shortly after 9 PM.
“It was the worst nightmare any parent could ever expect to have,” Mr.
Thompson said.
A little over an hour later that same knock came to Ms. Heywood’s
door when she and her husband, Timothy W. Heywood, were both in bed,
recuperating from a winter cold.
Ms. Heywood’s reaction was one of denial. “I didn’t believe she was
killed. I thought she was just hurt,” she said. “They wouldn’t let me
see her. I didn’t sleep for about two weeks. Life has never been the
same. It is like the rug is pulled out from under you and all your
hopes and dreams vanish in a second.”
Those hopes and dreams were embodied in a teenager whom her two
parents, who had been married for 13 years, described as happy, helpful
and intelligent.
Shannon was a leader, her mother said, the type of person who “if she saw someone get lost in the shadows would bring them out.”
In school she excelled as a student, an A-plus student who got upset “if she got anything below an A,” Ms. Heywood said.
She was on the math team, a member of Model UN and a musician who
played the guitar, saxophone, xylophone, and marimba. She used her
musical talents as a member of the symphony and marching bands at
Falmouth High School as well as the winter percussion.
And she balanced her free time between volunteering to teach 4th
graders at the Mullen-Hall School the saxophone and work at Ben &
Bill’s Chocolate Emporium on Main Street.
She had aspirations of attending Brown University and was planning,
on the weekend she was buried at St. Joseph’s Cemetery, to visit the
college “to make sure she would get everything on their lists so there
would be no way they could refuse her,” Ms. Heywood said. “Her senior
friends thought she was crazy.”
She had even gone so far, as part of a school project, to photoshop
a picture of her face on one of the members of the Brown University
Marching Band.
To say the past year has been difficult for the two is an
understatement. The weeks following Shannon’s death were like a blur.
Mr. Thompson described it as sleepwalking, “this surreal sensation that
still exists now. It still feels like it hasn’t really happened. I
still wait to wake up and see her.
“No child is living and breathing one second with all these dreams
and goals and then gone in another second,” Ms. Heywood said. “You
don’t know how to think. You don’t know how to exist. You don’t know
how to breathe. You have to learn to live again. Your life is forever
changed.”
Mr. Thompson, a plant supervisor at the Woods Hole Oceanographic
Institution, has had days when he has not been able to go into work.
After recovering from an injury and coping with her daughter’s
death, Ms. Heywood, a teacher’s assistant in a preschool program at the
East Falmouth Elementary School, returned to school in September. There
are times when students ask how many children she has. Those are the
difficult moments, she said, and her answer is always the same: two. “I
still talk about her in the present,” Ms. Heywood said. “I can’t tell a
4-year-old I have one, and one died. I can’t.”
Her other son, Seth P. Heywood, 13, also has difficulties coping
with the loss. Just a month earlier at Christmas they had received a
Wii and were playing it together all the time. “Now he won’t play it
anymore,” Ms. Heywood said.
The entire experience has brought to the forefront life’s deeper questions: Why are we here? What is our purpose in life?
To be honest, they said, they do not have those answers. “I leave it in God’s hands,” Mr. Thompson said.
For Ms. Heywood, there is more of a bitterness and an anger. “People
are not meant to bury their children. They are so energetic and full of
life,” she said. “I still hear people reassure me she is in a better
place. If she is in a better place, then why don’t we all die?”
There are times when she cries upon hearing a certain song or
looking at a picture. “You never know when it is going to hit you,” she
said. “Some people say it will get better, but it hasn’t for me. I
still miss her. I look at her bed every day. I keep her toothbrush next
to mine because I don’t like the empty hole. Her hairbrush and
everything is still there, as if she is ready to pick it up again.”
But despite struggling through the toughest year of their lives, the
two have benefited from the kindness of family, friends, and strangers,
all of whom have been touched in some way by Shannon.
A granite memorial bench and maple tree were donated anonymously and
placed at the rear of Falmouth High School leading into the band room,
in honor of Shannon.
A scholarship fund was started in Shannon’s memory last year,
targeted to Falmouth High School music students. The first recipient
was Elizabeth Leader who graduated last June and is now attending
Taylor University in Fort Wayne, Indiana.
Money for the scholarship has been raised in a variety of ways, from
car washes organized by the National Honor Society to a spring
fundraiser by the Cape Cod British Car Club, of which Mr. Thompson is a
member.
Some of Shannon’s friends created grayish-blue memorial bracelets
with proceeds from the sales going toward the scholarship. The top
reads Shannon Mary Thompson while underneath is one of Shannon’s
favorite sayings: “The World Is My Playground.”
Musician Aston Wright of Falmouth donates the Monday lesson that
Shannon once had, 4 to 4:30 PM, to a local student in need as a way to
honor her memory. He has also produced a CD of songs he wrote in her
memory.
Yesterday afternoon, as a light rain fell on Falmouth, many of those
who have helped preserve Shannon’s legacy met at the memorial bench at
Falmouth High School before heading to the Falmouth Elks Club on Palmer
Avenue for a celebration of her life.
They remembered the small things that made Shannon special. Junior
Sara Fredd, 17, talked about lunchtime discussions with Shannon when
the topic was usually their favorite author, Chuck Paluhniuk.
Junior Amanda Gay, 16, mentioned playing games like Snood and Sims
on the computer with Shannon, while her classmate Lexy Poulos, 16,
laughed about a friend’s birthday party when she and Shannon were
wrestling in an inflatable Moon Bounce and it collapsed. “We argued to
this day about who won that wrestling match,” Lexy said.
One of her closest friends, Maile Kolton, 18, a freshman at the
University of Massachusetts Dartmouth said today, and this entire week,
will be difficult for her. “I’m planning to spend time with my friends,
so I’m not alone,” she said. “I don’t want to be alone by myself. It
doesn’t feel like it’s been a year, but at the same time it feels like
it’s been a million years.”
Mr. Wright who performed at yesterday’s memorial gathering with
Jaden Black, 16, said the past year was a blur for him. “I don’t
remember the person I was before this,” he said. “It is hard to put
into words what her death means. All of us here are all a family now.”
Jaden said Shannon was “one of the best persons I have ever met in my life. She was one of my closest friends.”
For all who knew Shannon there is a sense of denial, refusing to believe she is gone.
“It has been really hard to see all her close friends go through so
much pain,” junior Leslie Ress, 16, said. “Sometimes I feel like it is
just a dream.
“We all miss her,” Ms. Heywood’s husband said. “Not a day goes by
that you don’t feel like she is going to walk through the door. We are
missing a little something in our household, actually a lot of
something.”