Shane Colligan Died Before His Time

All death is tragic, but it's compounded when a person dies before their life truly begins.

Mar 21, 2025

NOTE FROM JARED: I’m looking for a few parents that I can interview for an upcoming story. If you’re up to it, reply to this email or drop me a note. I promise it will be painless.

Scripture says that God knows when we will die. It’s right there in Psalm 139:161:

Your eyes saw my unformed substance;
in your book were written, every one of them,
the days that were formed for me,
when as yet there was none of them.

I suppose that provides comfort to some. That our story is written for us, we live the days that were preordained by a mystical, omniscient power, and then our time is up. Some adherents of The Bible even believe that you can hasten your exit by doing things like disobeying your parents,2 living recklessly,3 being too evil4 or even too good.5

This idea of dying before it’s your time is a concept with a much more vague definition that has grown beyond the spiritual, usually assigned to someone who dies at a young enough age. What’s “young enough,” you ask? I don’t know, which is why it’s so vague. While we have established here that all death is tragic, a school-aged child who dies is a tragedy, regardless of the cause. You hear it assigned most closely to people in their late teens through their 30s. “They died before their time” comes to mean that they were just getting their feet under them and establishing themselves as people, as adults. They never had the chance to experience the world in front of them. Though, at 52 years old, it’s possible that my mother died before her time. She never met her grandchildren and didn’t see her children get married. Life is a series of situations that are either extraordinarily vague or painstakingly precise.

I was 14 when an acquaintance of mine, Kevin, killed himself. A budding photographer with a troubled soul, he absolutely died before his time. We weren’t close friends, but it hit me in that numbing way of being the first person my age that I knew who died. Prior to that, and for years after, death had always come to older people in my world. Never had it ever come to one of my peers.

Dying Young

Death, like so many other process, should be orderly. Your parents are older than you, so they die first and you, child, shall be the one who does takes on the duty of burying them. It should never happen in reverse.

Except that it does. My grandmother, riddled with Alzheimer’s, was still alive when my mother died. Kevin’s parents are still alive and buried their son. For every natural order there is an equal and opposite bit of disorder.

Dying at a young age detonates emotions that aren’t supposed to be felt. Parents who lose an adult child, whether they are 20 or 60, deal with a level of guilt on top of their grief of the loss. “Parents are supposed to keep their children safe.” That’s what we tell ourselves — consciously and subconsciously — when they’re born, when they fall off their bikes, on their first day of school, the first time they get behind the wheel of a car, when you drop them at college, and when they go out into the world as grown-ass adults.

And, when they die before their time — and your time — it’s a sense of failure. The guilt must be unrelenting. I was supposed to know…supposed to be there…supposed to fix it all.

Even though your child was grown, you may regret the amount of independence that they had. You may feel tremendous guilt that you did not magically protect your child from harm. I’m the parent; my job was to keep my child safe and I did not protect them.

Then the guilt deepens as you, the parent, begin to rewind and second guess every moment of your relationship, regretting the times you didn’t call or visit or take the extra day to spend time with them. And, if it’s health-related, there’s the extra helping of guilt that you caused them to die. Your genes that you passed down left them predisposed to this condition or that inherited trait.

When it’s your friend, the grief becomes an alternate reality. You meet a stranger, find that you relate to them and bestow the title “friend” upon them. You invite them into your world and they invite you in to there’s. When you lose them, there’s almost a transitive proposition in the “That could have been me” thinking. Add in the fact that maybe you’re 18 or 20 or 22, and you’re still maturing emotionally to handle adult situations. Unfortunately, experience is the only preparation to manage your emotions surrounding a death. It’s learned, but it’s usually felt through the passage of older relatives who have lived (cliché alert) “a good life” or “a full life.” It’s never through someone who’s life has really just begun.

Detour…

My alma mater did away with fraternities and sororities during the Vietnam War era6, but I never felt like I missed out on the social aspects. As a journalism/mass communication major, I was involved at our campus newspaper — The Bona Venture7 — in some capacity during all four years. We spent Sunday through Thursday writing, editing and designing a newspaper, and Friday and Saturday drinking off the prior week’s edition. It was as much of a siblinghood as any other Greek Life arrangement; we felt like we lived at the paper, as opposed to having actual sleeping arrangements, but didn’t really haze anyone8.

Social circles at our college largely revolved around your dormitory floor and the activities your participated in, so it’s little wonder that my closest friends today were also contributors to the paper. It’s how, nearly 26 years since graduating, there are four of us — along with our families — that go on vacation together each summer and see each other semi-regularly through the year.

We’re not alone. I know people who have met while on staff and later married, friends who are godparents to one another’s children, and others like my group who still get together and tell the same stories over and over again. They’re relationships forged in the fires of 2 a.m. arguments over comma usage and computer crashes.

When we took on roles as editors, we also became caretakers of an idea. I don’t mean to make it sound more than it was, but not only were we responsible for putting out a newspaper, we took the mantle from those before us and tried to make it better for those who came after us.

People like Shane Colligan.

I Didn’t Know Shane Colligan, but They Did

I know about 100 words worth about Shane Colligan. He grew up in Wellsville, about 40 minutes from St. Bonaventure University, and came to the college as a journalism major. He was a fixture at The Bona Venture. I’ve heard him described as unfailingly kind, devilishly humorous, and possessing a big heart. The latter, of course, is the ironic part. Shane was born with a three-chamber heart and had two heart transplants in 23 years.

He died 50 days before he was supposed to graduate. The hearts that were given to him, that he gave to so many figuratively, literally stopped working. A group of his classmates are raising money to name a lounge in Shane’s memory as part of renovations and upgrades at the journalism school’s building. I asked some of them to share their memories. Memories of losing a friend before his time, at an age when they were still learning who they were.

A couple of them were kind enough to share their memories of him.

Leah Noonan

2025 is a landscape of apps, memes and short attention spans. With ease, we scroll through memories on platforms that did not exist in 2003. Us college friends, we’ve aged, together separately.

Of all the Bonaventure social media reunions since the rise of MySpace and then Facebook and Instagram, we have been missing an irrepressible magic. He will always be 23 years old.

Shane Colligan was your friend the instant you met. You snapped like a magnet into his positive energy and enthusiasm.

The last time I saw Shane, I’d returned to campus over a year after my graduation. Dreams dashed by the reality of an unresolved chronic illness, I’d abandoned my post as a reporter for a local paper and was working as a teacher assistant at a school.

Diverted from my path, living at home, I was not feeling like my school’s poster child for journalism success. Shane’s squeal of hello melted my trepidation. A one-man welcome wagon, one I needed.

A year later, I was in line at Shane’s calling hours. Following a second heart transplant, time had run out for him, weeks from his diploma. Friends in that mourning line would soon fade from view, scattered to our new lives, or old hometowns — as post-college life goes.

Shane and I never bonded over challenges of bearing illness in our lives. Ironically, I didn’t even know the extent of his condition until after he was gone.

A year after Shane’s passing and diagnosed with cancer, I understood his lesson clearer than ever: living fully is the only way to conquer a bitter hand you’re dealt. Shane taught us grabbing every second really matters. The brilliance of how he lived his life was deliberate — captivating on contact, and never saying no to the next possibility. No opportunity wasted.

This past fall, at a groundbreaking for our school’s new building I was plagued by an aching absence — Shane’s name — and I was not alone. Our friends are now converging on a common goal, to name a student lounge after him.

Shane Colligan did not get the chance to meander through a career in journalism, to make missteps, to navigate bureaucracy or foolishness. His network ended with us. His imprint was as solid as any soul living another decade or two longer. Fundraising for him now is our last chance to say, perhaps more permanently, thank you, Shane.

Rebecca Campana

“If your grief were an animal, what would it be?”

A therapist leading a professional development session asks. The session is hosted by the Wendt Center for Loss and Healing. I’m there for training on behalf of the theater work I do with grieving kids and families.

Twenty-two ago, our dear friend Shane T. Colligan died. It was 50 days before he was to graduate. I’d never had a friend die or a loss so sudden.

Looking back, I’d say my grief was a terrified baby bird, but a bird in a nest of sorts. That nest was grieving in community.

What did grieving in community look like?

A trusted person from University Ministries finding me in class to tell me the news.
A crowded memorial service in the chapel, arranged immediately.
Sleeping in a friend’s spare room so we didn’t have to be alone.
Putting my unsanctioned kitten in my backpack to take him to a friend that needed the comfort only pets can give.
Going roller skating for a more wholesome evening after we realized we’d been on a grief-induced bender.
The bus the college arranged to take us to Shane’s funeral in case we couldn’t get there ourselves.
Hearts to wear on our graduation caps.

Then, that nest was gone too, because, 50 days later and still reeling, I graduated college. My grief became a shivering baby bird on the scary, cold ground.

And, man, suddenly grieving alone was terrible. How do you explain the sadness you are carrying? To whom? And when? And how many other people in this grocery store line are invisibly dealing with their own animals?

A few years later, in a way I couldn’t have planned, my bird and I started leading drama workshops at the Wendt Center’s grief camps, which grew into family workshops and helping grieving teenagers make and perform plays about their experiences.

The Wendt Center’s motto is apt: “No one should have to grieve alone.”

Each year, I get to introduce Shane to my teen group: his terrible car “Big Shitty,” the cartoons he scribbled in the margins of USA Today at a gas station when we got stranded in rural Pennsylvania, the flaming cabbage to celebrate his heart transplant anniversary, and his kindness.

Sitting in this training, I can see I still don’t know much for sure about the animal grief. I like, though, what one of my teens said: “no one else can understand exactly what you’re going through, but I’m here, and you don’t have to go through it alone.”

Fundraising for the Shane Colligan Memorial Lounge runs through the spring.

Final Thoughts on Finality

"You don't exactly get over it, an offensive phrase under any circumstances, but the grief, in time, does turn into a nostalgic ache that is almost comforting."

— P.J. O’Rourke