After a tragedy, Brianna Shaughnessy discovers a different way to heal at the Great Barrier Reef.

Brianna Shaughnessy is a PhD Student in Environmental Biology at the University of Massachusetts Boston. Prior to joining Jarrett Byrnes' lab as a Coasts and Communities Fellow, she completed a Master's of Professional Science through Northeastern University's Three Seas Program. Her past research focussed on surveying kelp forests with the purpose of assessing the impacts of global change on such critical ecosystems. As a native of Cape Cod, MA, an integral part of Brianna's upbringing involved constantly questioning and developing a deep respect for coastal communities. Her current research focusses on the development of sustainable fisheries practices in hopes of acting as liaison between the community that raised her and the scientists aiming to understand and protect it.

This story originally aired on August 16, 2019 in an episode titled “The College Years.”

Story Transcript

It was sophomore year science class and the most popular boy at our high school in Cape Cod passed me a note.  I thought for sure he had the wrong person.  Teenagers are awkward but I was an exceptionally awkward teenager so you can imagine how horrified I was when I realized the note was for me from Corey Dooling, the boy that all the girls were distracted by. 

He had this platinum blonde hair and these bright, turquoise blue eyes and this smile that lit up every classroom that he walked into.  He's the kid that teachers hated to admit that they loved but you could tell that they were rooting for him.  Compare that to me, quiet, only child.  I was on crutches for the better part of two years because of reconstructive knee surgeries.  That ruled me out of team sports so I was an obligatory bookworm. 

So holding the note like a hot potato, I had no choice but to open it but I was totally confused by what it said.  “Are you really going to take that?”

Corey was referring to something that I didn’t know that he had seen by my locker when a boy that was asked to carry my book bag while I was on crutches had tossed it down the hallway in this fit of teenage rage and I had gone hobbling after it on my crutches.  Corey thought I should have stood up for myself, or he could if I needed him to. 

See, Corey was a problem solver.  One time, when his guardian wouldn’t let him go on a school surf trip to North Carolina, he simply forged her signature.  Problem solved.  In the dead of winter at the first sign of a nor’easter, Corey would skip school so that he could catch the best waves on the outer Cape beaches with just a seven millimeter wetsuit between him and the frigid Atlantic Ocean.  I thought he was crazy, but I was also drawn to it. 

It wouldn’t be until junior year that Corey would start inviting me on those trips and I would start lying to my family and my friends to go with him that I realized something serious might be building there.  I truly savor those moments that I got to see this deep connection that Corey had with the ocean.  That’s how my first love snuck up on me. 

Corey would go on to do the normal high school sweetheart things, like take me to prom, but he would also rip me out of my daydreams and he would teach me to walk into every room and look at every stranger as a new friend, not someone to be anxious or awkward around.  It’s through those lessons that I would learn how Corey ended up with us by way of Colorado from a bad home environment now raised by his grandmother on Cape Cod. 

A few years after Corey passed me that note, we sat down the night before I went to college with this travel guide that I had given him for his eighteenth birthday.  The guide was to Hawaii but that conversation quickly turned into a talk about traveling the world.  In the back, we tucked this note of the craziest adventures that our 18-year-old brains could come up with.  Get a tattoo, skydive, scuba dive the Great Barrier Reef, surf in Australia, travel around Central America.

I wanted to be an artist, Corey wanted to be a surfer, but those careers aren’t exactly encouraged by high school guidance counselors so I went on to study art and Corey stayed on Cape eventually becoming an EMT.  We’d see each other on weekends and holidays, but before I knew it I was a sophomore in college.

Towards the end of that year, on March 30th 2009, I turned off my phone so I could go to sleep.  In the morning, it was flooded with messages.  Not knowing where to start and sensing this impending chaos, I called my best friend.  She answered and said that Corey was in an accident.  I remember asking her if he was okay, what hospital he was at, and she said no.  And I just remember dropping the phone. 

Later, I would find out that Corey was driving on a windy road on a rainy night.  Our high school guidance counselor’s son was backing out of their blind driveway.  Corey’s car simultaneously lost control.  Because he was an EMT, some of the first responders were his friends.  Corey died at the scene a week shy of his 21st birthday. 

Things black out for a while after that.  I remember my father picking me up and taking me back to Cape Cod where our high school had created this safe space for us to grieve.  And it’s in those same hallways where Corey and I built our love that his absence started to trickle throughout our tiny, tiny community. 

I remember an ambulance completely blacked out with cloth at his funeral.  I remember seeing my father cry for the first time.  And I remember feeling completely alienated wherever I went, especially around my college friends who now felt so much younger than I felt. 

Feeling isolated and also medicated, I push my way through my sophomore year of college and I watch this wave of numbness and grief wash over my best friends from home.  Many of us have taken belongings of Corey’s that had sentimental meaning.  I found a pack of clove cigarettes and a t-shirt that smelled like him, but someone had the foresight to stash away the travel guide.  When it came back to me, it still had the list in the back. 

Desperate for a sense of direction and a way to feel like I was taking control of my own grief, I decided I had to do those things for myself and also for Corey.  Where most art students would to go France or Spain to study abroad, I signed up to go to Australia.  My mom, also grieving, joined me on adventures in skydiving and bungee jumping and, for the year anniversary of Corey’s death, we set out to dive the Great Barrier Reef. 

I remember the instructors just before we got in the water giving us this debrief on how to vomit into our regulators and thinking, “This is not what I expected.”  But when we got in the water, I didn’t feel the claustrophobia that most people warned me about.  I just felt the warm embrace of tropical waters.  And by the time we got to the bottom, I was just enamored with how quiet it was.  All I could hear was the bubbles from my own breathing and my own heartbeat. 

The closer that I looked, the more that I saw.  There was this giant mound that I thought was a rock, but when we came up to it it ended up being a giant clam.  It had this bright, purple, fleshy mouth and these dozens of turquoise blue eyes and it was just remarkable.  They were the same color as Corey’s eyes. 

Around the clam were fish and anemones and corals and so many things had gathered in this tiny little snapshot of the ocean and I wanted to know what everything was. 

Corey taught me that I could be anything that I wanted to be so I came up from that dive determined to be a Biology major.  I would go on to take classes in ecology in Costa Rica and Belize and, eventually, I would do a Master’s in Marine Biology.  That would take me on crazy diving adventures to Panama where I swim with whale sharks and Friday Harbor, Washington where pods of endangered orca whales live.  Finally, after being told I couldn’t do things for most of my life because of my knees, I found somewhere that I could excel intellectually and physically. 

Then I faced a crossroads in the year before funding came in for me to start my PhD where I could go back to Cape Cod or I could do what Corey would do, create my own adventure.  So I ended up in the landlocked mountains of Colorado, I worked in a sushi restaurant, I skied fresh powder, I hiked in the Rockies and I even met someone.  So by the time the buzzer rang for me to come back to Massachusetts, I almost stayed out there. 

But eight years after Corey died, three weeks before I was meant to drive back to Boston, I stopped at a lit crosswalk for a pedestrian.  A 17-year-old on her cellphone rear-ended me going almost 30 miles an hour.  Time paused, as it tends to, and the pedestrian and I locked eyes and he jumped out of the way.  The next thing I knew was this bone-chilling crunch of metal and that rush of adrenaline that your body gives you when it thinks it’s going to die. 

All at once, I physically experienced the things that I had nightmares about, about Corey’s last moments on this earth.  That accident would follow me back to Massachusetts where I was devastated to realize that diving wasn’t the same.  I'd come up disoriented and nauseous and I had to change the trajectory of my research completely. 

But the day after the accident, as I tried to pick up the pieces of my life and get myself back to the east coast, Corey was right there, or it could have been my own brain at this point, saying, “Are you really going to take that?”

This time I knew the answer was no, because I already stood up to the worst thing I could possibly take.  I lost Corey.  Thank you.