Donate Life Rose Parade Honoree

November 2021:

More than 10 years after the unexpected death of 16-year-old William Rollings McMahon of Pensacola, his mother is getting ready to celebrate the impact and shared legacy of his life in an extraordinary way.

Kim McMahon, William’s mother and a tissue recipient, will represent the American Association of Tissue Banks (AATB) as a rider on the 2022 Donate Life Rose Parade float. Kim received donor bone during an eight-hour spinal fusion surgery to repair and strengthen her spine in 2021.

“All of those years that I was telling William’s story, I never expected that I would be the one who would become a recipient,” Kim said. “Who would have believed that our stories would have such a twist?”

Kim built her life and career around promoting organ donation and sharing her son’s story in an effort to help others and keep his memory alive. William was an active, healthy honor student when he developed flu-like symptoms just after Christmas in 2004. His condition worsened, and doctors discovered that he did not have the flu. He was in acute liver failure.

He was airlifted to UF Health Shands Hospital in Gainesville, Fla., and immediately put on the transplant waiting list. William received a lifesaving liver transplant. His recovery was going very well, when he suddenly fell ill again. Five months after his transplant, William was back on the waiting list in need of a second liver transplant. Unfortunately, he passed away in May of 2005 before a matching donor could be found.

“William was not a donor when he died. He wasn’t able to be because he had developed cancer,” Kim said. “I know he would have wanted to be, and I would have wanted that too.”

For Kim, the decision to promote organ donation while juggling family and a full-time career as a Delta Airlines flight attendant was easy. It was her way of enhancing someone else’s life, even in her own time of loss.

“When I started talking about organ donation, Florida didn’t have an online donor registry,” Kim said.

The Joshua Abbott Organ and Tissue Donor Registry was launched in 2009 when Florida’s Agency for Health Care Administration chose Donate Life Florida to create a statewide donor registry, increase enrollment and educate Floridians about donation.  The namesake of Florida’s donor registry, Joshua Abbott, was a cystic fibrosis patient who advocated for years for Medicare coverage for lung transplant recipients.  Abbott, who did receive a lung transplant, passed away in 2006.

Kim touted the need for more registered organ donors for years prior to the unveiling of the statewide donor registry. She became an advocate after spending time in the pediatric ICU with her son, William, while he was waiting for his second liver.

“What I saw were parents struggling to decide whether their child should become a donor.  They had not discussed it,” Kim said.  “I know what I went through when William died right in front of me.  I didn’t want anyone else to go through that.”

Motivated by her son’s memory, Kim jumped in feet first volunteering at William’s alma mater, Pensacola High School. She was encouraged when faculty, staff and students welcomed her with open arms.

“These precious teachers of William’s were devastated,” Kim said. “I went in year after year.”

Kim founded The William Rollings McMahon Organ Donation Educational and the nonprofit, donate4william.org, to provide public education and awareness.

She also sparked a successful T-shirt campaign. A devoted surfer, William’s final farewell was a paddle-out ceremony.  During the ancient Hawaiian tradition, William’s fellow surfers paddled into the ocean on surf boards, formed a circle and joined hands. A friend snapped a picture of the gathering and gave it to Kim.

“It looked like the circle of life,” she said. “It just came to me: Don’t break the circle of life.  If you choose organ donation, life will continue.”

Kim printed the circle-of-life image on 50 T-shirts and gave them to William’s friends. Soon requests for T-shirts started rolling in.  When other recipients and donor families wanted to get involved, Kim graciously incorporated their ideas and art onto T-shirts, cards and other items. She knew the campaign had taken on a life of its own when she started receiving selfies from students and strangers wearing circle-of-life T-shirts from locations around the world.

“It’s like a walking, talking billboard,” she said.

Kim recalled the first time she saw someone wearing a circle-of-life T-shirt.  It was on a woman at an ATM holding a baby in her hometown of Pensacola, Fla.

“I got so excited that I went up to her and said, ‘Thank you for wearing that T-shirt,’ and I told her, ‘That’s my son’,” Kim said. “It turns out she was a nurse.”

Kim partnered with Chain Reaction, a nonprofit dedicated to providing service learning, leadership development and meaningful career guidance for teens. Together, they developed a Donate Life Week in Pensacola high schools and adopted a highway on the Emerald Coast in honor of William and Donate Life.

Kim has taken part in organ donation PSAs at the University of West Florida and appeared in the PBS documentary, Transplant: A Gift for Life. She produced an inspiring three-part videos series for social media called “Will 2 Live,” and she was featured in the Delta Airlines employee magazine, Delta Digest. She is scheduled to speak at a trauma conference in November 2021.

In honor of her giving spirit, People Magazine recognized Kim as one of 40 women who embody inner and outer beauty in the May 5, 2014 issue, according to the Pensacola News Journal.

Nowadays, the opportunity to promote organ donation seems to find Kim wherever she travels. Her message is always the same.

“Focus on the here and now,” she said. “And register to become and organ donor.”

The Rose Bowl Parade is scheduled for New Year’s Day, January 1, 2022, in Pasadena, Calif. On that Sunday, Kim will take part in delivering the Donate Life message to an audience of millions.

The theme of the 2022 Donate Life Rose Parade float is Courage to Hope. Leading up to the parade, Kim will help place flowers on the Egyptian-styled float that features a lion and gondolas. Riders will include 40 organ and tissue recipients from throughout the U.S., including Kim.

“I still kind of have to pinch myself,” Kim said. “Secretly, I wanted to be on it.”

Kim’s remarkable ability to turn the tragedy of her son’s untimely death into advocacy connected her to organ donation in a deeply personal way. Life came full circle when she became a tissue recipient.

To her way of thinking, the stories are fatefully intertwined. She’s proud of the impact she’s made in William’s honor and for the mission it inspired within her. After losing a loved one at such a young age, she is looking forward to celebrating a milestone in her son’s honor.

“It’s all a good thing,” Kim said. “You never know when you might be in a situation to need a transplant. Never did I ever think I would be in a position to need anything. Never. Maybe this is my destiny to be on this float.”

“There’s a quote that asks, how do you know when you’ve done your life’s duty?” said Kim. “I’m not done yet.”