The bond Bill and Pat Ledbetter share with Bonnie Lundy goes beyond friendship.

Next week, Lundy plans to continue nurturing that bond when she rides on the Donate Life float in Pasadena’s annual Tournament of Roses Parade holding a floragraph (a decorative photo) of the Ledbetter’s late daughter, Shay.

In August 1992, the Ledbetters donated their daughter Shay’s heart to Bonnie after Shay suffered devastating injuries in a hit and run accident while walking in the bicycle lane of a Denton street near her new home.

Shay was a 22-year-old graduate student studying sociology at the University of North Texas.

“She still had the idealism and optimism of youth, believing she could make a difference in this troubled old world,” her mother, Pat, wrote in an article about Shay published in Impression Magazine in the fall of 1998.

Shay’s assailant was an elderly man who was driving drunk.

Doctors performed two surgeries on Shay but after five days in a coma, they told the Ledbetters their daughter would not recover.

The decision to donate Shay’s organs was not complicated, Ledbetter said.

“She had voiced her support for organ donations many times,” she said in a 2007 interview.

In the late summer of 1992, Bonnie Lundy was also struggling with a world of trouble.

Viral cardiomyopthy had all but destroyed her heart.

Diagnosed at 17, Lundy said medications initially kept the disease under control.

But, at 21, she was running out of time and required a heart transplant.

“I was very much aware of the situation,” she said of her state of mind just before the transplant.

Recovery wasn’t easy for Lundy.

She said she took tiny steps on the way back to a normal life.

“I wanted to be able to walk to the bathroom. The next goal was to make a sandwich without help. Later, I went to the gym and walked on the treadmill for eight minutes,” she said.

She gradually increased her walking to 45 minutes at a time, then went on to aerobics and weight lifting.

“I never quit,” she said in an Oct. 8, 2007 Register story.

After the transplant, she chose to use her newfound life to help others, volunteering with Transplants for Children.

She later worked for the National Kidney Foundation and the Alzheimer’s Foundation in San Antonio and became executive director of Transplants for Children in 2005.

Lundy said her decision to contact the Ledbetters came after an interview with a reporter.

She’d been carrying around a dog-eared note for the couple, not certain when or if she wanted to mail it.

After the interview, she put a stamp on the envelope and put the card in the mail.

The Ledbetters and Lundy finally met in front a group of reporters and photographers where they exchanged hugs before heading for a private room to talk.

The three have grown close in the years since they first met.

Bill and Pat were with Lundy when she married last summer.

“Bill walked down the aisle with her and her dad, and I got to light the unity candle,” Pat said via e-mail. “She married a cardiologist who specializes in patients who receive heart transplants.”

Lundy is set to arrive in California Sunday for the Rose Parade.

She’ll be one of 25 organ recipients on the Donate Life Float.

In a telephone interview Friday, Lundy said she was not one of the original individuals picked to ride in this year’s parade.

She said she was in California this summer with a friend after being nominated for an award when she and her friend met the deputy mayor of a California city who asked if she knew about the Rose parade and Donate Life’s association with it.

Parade officials later heard her story.

“They thought my story was what Donate Life is all about,” she said. “They asked if I could ride the float and then built a seat for me.”

Lundy will ride with others whose lives have been touched by organ transplants.

Some of the riders are recipients or patients on organ transplant lists.

Others are family members of donors.

Each will cradle a picture of someone they wish to honor.

Lundy plans to hold a picture of Shay, decorated with delicate roses.

She said she has no idea what she will be thinking as the float travels down the parade route.

But she is certain of one thing.

“I hope everyone who sees the float thinks of organ donations,” she said.

Lundy has received media attention and told her story many times to many different people. But she never forgets Shay’s sacrifice and her own gift to the young woman whose promising life was suddenly taken from her.

“My gift to Shay is in my job, in what I do and how I help other families deal with their situation. Her being a part of me, we’re in this together,” she said.

To read Bonnie’s story or to find out about the other 25 Donate Life float riders see http://www.donatelifefloat.org/prod/components.