Mom finds comfort in teen's gift

April 30, 2007

Mom finds comfort in teen's gift

By ANNE GEGGIS
Staff Writer
news-journalonline

DELTONA -- At 16, she had her wedding planned -- right down to which husband and what color bridesmaid dresses. She had picked out a career working with endangered sea life. And she'd chosen her babies' names.

But when Tiffany Accardi lost control of the fire-engine red Pontiac Sunbird -- a gift for her 16th birthday less than two months before -- plans took a tragic turn for her and four others killed in a crash on Interstate 95 in Brevard County that fall day 12 years ago.

Her mom, Billie Lomonaco, still recalls how she realized that her younger daughter was not going to survive the crash when a representative from an organ procurement organization approached her and asked if she would want her daughter's organs donated.

"My first reaction was, 'Well, Tiffany's going to need them,' " said Lomonaco.

She had just come from a consultation with the doctors. But somehow she hadn't realized that they were telling her that her petite, curly-headed, hazel-eyed teenager was not going to recover.

"I know what 'brain dead' means until it's my daughter," she said.

Because her family included a cousin that had needed a kidney transplant for survival, Lomonaco's "no" quickly turned to a "yes." Especially since Tiffany herself had made a big deal of getting the organ donor sticker on her license just a few months earlier.

"I remembered us all sitting there, waiting for the phone to ring," she said, recalling how her cousin had run out of veins for dialysis.

Her "yes" to donating Tiffany's organs had phones ringing across the country. Tiffany's heart went to Miami, where it beat for 10 more years in a man in his early 50s.

A young Gainesville mother in her 30s received Tiffany's liver. A kidney went to a 19-year-old man in Ohio. Another kidney went to Arkansas, to a man in his mid-50s. A cornea was transplanted to an Orlando woman who wrote to tell Lomonaco that there was so much more she could see. Another person received her other cornea.

Tiffany was enough of a ham in front of a video camera that her mother has a tape of clips a friend put together showing Tiffany jumping on a trampoline, clowning with a wig, wrestling on the front lawn, using a hairspray can to sing along karoake-style. Those clips are interspersed with pictures of her at Sea World, in her sister's wedding and at a birthday party.

"She was going to start a band and nobody knew how to play an instrument," sighed Lomonaco.

Speaking about the donation -- to urge other people to become organ donors -- has become something of a new mission for Lomonaco, who retired from volunteer firefighting and now babysits her grandchildren daily.

"I might have lost someone I love, but part of her still lives on."

anne.geggis@news-jrnl.com

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