PORT ST. LUCIE PEOPLE
The AUTHOR
JOHN BIONDO PHOTOS
Mother of four, Iris Romeo and her husband, Orlando, lost their daughter,
Ann Marie, in a car crash as she was returning to college.
What is a dime worth? For one Port St. Lucie mother,
60 Port St. Lucie Magazine
a dime is the reminder of a life that keeps on giving,
even after death.
Iris Romeo lost her college-age daughter, Ann
Marie, in an auto crash. She and three friends were returning
home to Waterbury, Conn., from a trip to a seminar and
stopped at the caverns in Virginia. Ann Marie took a dime from
her pocket to phone home saying they were running late.
On the way home, they hit black ice on Interstate 81 in
Scranton, Pa. The driver and front-seat passenger survived the
crash but unfortunately for Ann Marie and her friend in the
back (the girls had unbuckled their seat belts to rest more comfortably),
the car was rear-ended and they were ejected from
the vehicle.
Four cars were involved in the pileup. On Nov. 12, 1990,
at 3 a.m., Iris and her husband, Orlando, received the phone
call that no parent ever wants to get. She was told her daughter
was in an accident and was in serious condition at Mercy
Hospital. A close friend of Orlando rushed over to drive them
there. Four hours later, they arrived at the hospital. Within two
hours, Ann Marie was gone.
“Still, after 23 years, she is with us,” Iris says.
A social worker gave her Ann Marie’s clothes and personal
effects. Iris placed them in Ann Marie’s bedroom but gave a
leather jacket to her close friend, Michelle O’Malley. There was
a dime still in the pocket. Ann Marie was known for having
extra dimes to make phone calls, giving them out if needed.
“It was very symbolic to me that the only thing in the
snapped pocket of the jacket she wore to her death was a
dime,” O’Malley recollects.
O’Malley had an assignment for her college art appreciation
class and decided to sketch an outstretched hand offering a
dime in memory of Ann Marie. The drawing was entered in an
exhibition.
Iris taught hairdressing at a vocational school in Waterbury.
The family lived next door to St. Michael’s Catholic Church.
She was the first female lector and was well-known in the
community. The outpouring at the memorial was astonishing.
The Romeos knew there wouldn’t be a place big enough for all
the attendees afterward, so the pastor decided they would be
the first to use the church’s basement to accommodate all the
guests.
In the two weeks following the funeral, the Romeo home
was filled with visitors and well-wishers: family, coworkers,
neighbors. Ann Marie’s friends brought dinners, flowers,
memorials and Mass cards. Many of them returned two weeks
later to acknowledge the outpouring of love; they wrote 850
thank you cards.
Trying to settle back to a sense of normalcy with their three
other children, dimes began to appear.
At 10 minutes to midnight one night, the phone rang. It jolted
Iris. O’Malley was weeping uncontrollably. Calming down,
she explained that earlier that evening she found a dime in her
apartment. Thinking nothing of it, she found another one. Perhaps,
she thought, it was her roommates leaving a reminder of
Ann Marie, but that was not the case.
Then there was the time she and her roommates went to a lo-
>>
BY DEBRA MAGRANN