The news coverage has faded, the memorials have ended, and the condolences have slowed.

But for Vanessa Scimone, the pain of losing her son, Nicolas Scimone, 22, remains as strong as ever.

Nicolas died in a motorcycle accident on August 28 in St. Augustine, just 20 hours after he last saw his mother.

Another driver turned onto Ponce De Leon Boulevard and hit him as he rode south around 3 p.m., Vanessa told The Citizen.

A Special Visit

Nicolas, who was training to be a lineman and engaged to be married, made a surprise visit to see his mother on August 27—her birthday.

Vanessa was at her cosmetology school when she got a call from Nicolas.

“Are you home, Mom?” he asked.

“No, I’ll be back later after school,” she replied.

“Okay,” he said. “I’m going to wait for you at your house until you get home. I want to wish you a happy birthday.”

Vanessa was touched. Her kids always called or texted on her birthday, but in-person visits from Nicolas and his brothers, Anthony and Brian, had become rare as they grew older.

When she got home in Hastings, Nicolas was there, standing next to the red Triumph motorcycle he had bought earlier that year.

He hugged her and gave her a kiss. He was excited about his upcoming wedding to Alyssa Howard and had just secured a loan to attend lineman school.

Her little boy was growing up.

“I hugged him,” Vanessa said. “I kissed him. I told him I loved him. That was the last moment I had with him.”

A Tragic Accident

The next day, Vanessa’s phone pinged. It was a message in the family group chat.

Someone had posted a photo of a crashed red motorcycle on a local Facebook page.

“Is that Nick’s bike?” a relative asked.

Vanessa’s heart pounded. But she didn’t see the saddlebags Nicolas had just bought, so she told herself it wasn’t his.

“You go straight into denial,” she said. “I told them it wasn’t him. But deep down, I probably knew.”

Hours passed with no word from the police. Nicolas wasn’t answering his phone. That evening, she drove to his home in St. Augustine, where he should have been—but he wasn’t there.

“That’s when I knew,” she said.

A short time later, her niece called. The police were at Vanessa’s house and needed to speak to her.

She later learned from a Facebook post that a nurse had been at the accident scene. The woman had rushed to help Nicolas, performing chest compressions as he lay in the street.

That same nurse had lost her own brother, also named Nicholas, to cancer not long ago.

“I just thanked her as a mother for being there with Nick when I couldn’t be,” Vanessa said. “I was worried that he suffered. But she told me she didn’t think he did.”

Honoring His Memory

As she grieved, Vanessa had to handle arrangements for his burial and memorial. Nicolas’ father, John Scimone, had passed away in 2018.

Hoping for guidance, Vanessa called Alyssa to see if she and Nicolas had ever talked about their final wishes.

To her surprise, they had.

Nicolas wanted to be cremated and buried beneath a Norfolk Island Pine sapling—his favorite tree.

“They said that as the saplings grow, they would grow together,” she said.

Nicolas’ friends and family plan to plant small trees and place some of his ashes at their bases.

A Love for the Outdoors

Nicolas was happiest outside, whether in the woods or on the beach.

“He was a spur-of-the-moment, live-in-the-moment kind of kid,” Vanessa said.

But he was ready to settle down with Alyssa. They met at Pedro Menendez High School and dreamed of having four kids. They had even picked out names.

“It’s sad to think about these things that will never happen,” Vanessa said through tears.

A Final Tribute

On September 7, they held a celebration of life for Nicolas. A local motorcycle club organized a memorial ride, and Vanessa joined, riding on the back of her partner’s bike.

It was painful to revisit the crash site.

“You can see an imprint of where he was, and that alone was very hard,” she said.

But despite her grief, Vanessa is moving forward with her dream of opening her own salon.

“The day before he died, I told him the name of the salon and what the colors would be,” she said. “Sometimes I think about changing it, but I can’t. Because that’s what I told him it was going to be.”