A long overdue post…

I’m writing this five years too late.

It was the fall of 1989, and I was about to start 8^th grade at a new school: Christian Academy of Louisville. Back then, the entire K-12 school consisted of only a couple of hundred students, and was mainly housed in a building that looked like a barn – probably because it was located next to a group of riding stables. Seriously. When you opened a bathroom stall, you half expected to find a pile of hay and Mr. Ed.

I actually met Jerome before the school year started, when parents of new students showed up for a tour. Our parents brought us to fill out paperwork and see the school. At the time I was experiencing the middle schooler version of an existential crisis, having had to change schools that summer because a bus route had been eliminated. I didn’t want a new school, with new students, new teachers, new friends. I wanted to go back to my old school.

I don’t remember much about him that day, but somehow we connected. I remember he was short, kind of stout, with black hair and glasses. Neither of us was particularly popular, and we were both kinda nerdy, so maybe that’s why we started hanging out. But once the school year began, we became best friends.

We shared a love of all things NASA. I don’t know if he was already interested in space science, or if he caught that bug from me, but somehow we both got it in our heads that we were gonna be astronauts. So did Taylor, another kid in class. Jerome, Taylor and I swore that when we graduated high school, the three of us would join the Air Force Academy and somehow get selected for the astronaut corps.

I think I was the one who got Jerome hooked on Star Trek. We ate up anything that was sci-fi: Star Trek, Star Wars. We read Douglas Adams’ “Hitchhiker’s Guide” books at around the same time. We even joined one of those scam book clubs where you could get half a dozen science-fiction books for a penny. I mean, we hadn’t even gotten through Junior Achievement yet, but even WE knew THAT was a deal. We would bring our catalogs to school and compare them to figure out which books we were going to order. Eventually our parents put a stop to it once the club started sending us unsolicited books, then charging us for them when we didn’t immediately send them back.

We pranked our creative writing teacher – a first-year teacher who had just graduated college – by planting dozens of strips of paper with the words “STUDENT TAKEOVER” all over her classroom, just because we thought she was cute. She would still be finding them the following school year.

Somehow as middle-schoolers, we got parts in the high school play. Back then the class sizes at CAL ranged from only 20-30 kids, so the high school didn’t have enough people. That meant they drafted Jerome and I. The play was called, “It Was a Dark and Stormy Night,” and was a PG-rated mystery/comedy/horror mashup. He was “Ed Perkins,” the cab driver and college student. I played the role of “Dawson,” a detective whom I modeled after the character of Agent Dale Cooper from the television show “Twin Peaks.” (SIDE NOTE: Peaks was a popular murder mystery show on network television at the time, and I thought Agent Cooper was way cool. The original network series might be worth checking out, but I cannot recommend the raunchy sequel series that aired in 2017.)

When they built the set, a 16-year-old high school kid named Brian drafted Jerome and I to help him transport the construction materials from the school to the church that housed the stage. (For those in the area, it was the old Southeast Christian Church building on Hikes Lane, now the site of Canaan Baptist Church.) Because the two of us were only 13 and didn’t have driver’s licenses, that “help” consisted of sitting atop several sheets of plywood piled so high that they were overflowing the bed of Brian’s truck. He wanted us to sit on the plywood while he made the 5-mile drive to the church, so that – get this – the plywood wouldn’t fall off.

Yes, it was still legal to do that in 1990. That trip nearly killed us, but we had a blast. We were hanging out with high school kids. We were SO cool.

Ad Astra!

The best part of that school year came near the end. During the spring, Jerome, Taylor and I went with a group of CAL students to Space Camp in Huntsville, Alabama. It was a space geek’s dream. We prepared by watching the film “Space Camp.” The movie is extremely hokey and unrealistic, but it was shot on the Space Camp campus and it started me on a years-long crush on Lea Thompson. We also purchased “The Space Shuttle Operator’s Manual” (yes, there is such a thing) and studied it voraciously. You know, just in case we happened to come across a space shuttle to operate.

When the time came, Jerome, Taylor and I camped out at Space Camp’s U.S. Space and Rocket Center. We stayed in a newly constructed futuristic “habitat” building, used a number of simulators and chewed on “space ice cream” that had the consistency of rubber, but it was “space” ice cream, so that didn’t matter. The climax of Space Camp (the camp, not the movie) comes near the end of the week, when you and your teammates fly a simulated shuttle mission. The three of us had it all figured out: Taylor and Jerome wanted to be shuttle commanders, and I wanted to be shuttle pilot. Out of a team of 20-or-so campers, and only two shuttle missions, we knew it was next to impossible that all three of us would get the roles we wanted, but we were committed to cheering on any one of us who did.

You can’t imagine our surprise late one afternoon when the three of us got our assignments: Jerome – Commander, me – Pilot, Taylor – Commander of a second mission. Against all odds, we all got exactly what we wanted. Somewhere I have a picture of the three of us in blue flight jackets, proudly standing under the nozzle of one of the rockets in the U.S. Space and Rocket Center’s rocket park. NASA could have flown that rocket to the moon that day, fueled purely by the sheer strength of our egos.

When the time for our mission came, we were nervous. Another team that went before us actually died. I mean, not literally DIED, but, you know what I mean. Someone in the shuttle cockpit dropped the solid rocket boosters while the vehicle was still on the launch pad, killing everyone. Their two-hour mission was cut short in a manner of minutes. As we piled into the shuttle simulator’s cockpit, Jerome and I didn’t want to make the same mistake.

I’ll spare you the details, but our mission was a success: we communicated flawlessly with the other campers at “Mission Control,” did our pre-launch checks and successfully reached orbit. Once in orbit, our mission specialists went EVA and did whatever it is they did. Jerome and I even responded to some in-flight emergencies the gremlin guys threw at us, using the checklists in our binders, before we landed safely. There were no casualties. And we even managed to drop the solid rocket boosters and the external tank at the RIGHT times.

I don’t remember much about the mission debriefing, but I do recall our camp counselor noting that our shuttle mission had “great teamwork in the cockpit.” Jerome and I were elated. Taylor also led his shuttle team on a successful flight and was even named the All Star camper of the group. We were the middle school equivalent of “The Right Stuff.”

The Fellowship is broken

At the end of the school year, I got devastating news. Jerome and his family were going to move away to Indianapolis. That doesn’t seem far when you’re living in 2024 and have a driver’s license, but when all you have is a bicycle in 1990, Indianapolis might as well be the moon. I was saddened to think that Jerome would not be in class next year, but we vowed to stay in touch.

I can remember one of the last times I saw him. We had been hanging out at his house, when my mom came to pick me up. When she got there, Jerome and I continued to goof off, while our moms talked “grown up” stuff in the kitchen until it was time to leave. They were talking quietly, and I couldn’t tell what they were saying.

We said our goodbyes and then mom and I got in the car. When she shut the door, she burst into tears. I never forgot what she told me:

“Jerome’s mother is going to die,” she said, sobbing. “She says she has a terminal disease. She only has a few years left to live. And it’s hereditary. She says there’s a 50 percent chance Jerome has the same thing.”

—-

I didn’t know the name of the disease. In the one year that I went to school with him, Jerome never once mentioned anything about it. To this day, I don’t know if he knew at that point that he was susceptible. I never asked him. We took a trip to King’s Island, and within a few weeks, he and his family moved to Indianapolis. I never saw him again.

We did our best to stay in touch. But you have to remember, this was 1990, and cell phones weren’t really a thing. Neither was free long distance. A call from Louisville to Indianapolis would quickly run up the phone bill, so phone calls were rare, and even then, our parents wouldn’t let us talk for more than a few minutes.

Instead, we came up with what I think was a pretty creative solution. We made tape recordings. We would record messages on cassettes and mail them to each other. Every few weeks we would send cassettes, filled with reviews of our favorite movies, books, and songs. At one point, I bought a cheap four-channel audio mixer from Radio Shack and my nephew and I started writing and recording audio dramas on cassettes, using Jerome and his siblings as our trial audience.

But there was no email, no internet, no social media at the time. Our world was a lot smaller – and long-distance friendships were expensive to maintain. Within a few months, life happened, we grew up, made new friendships, and eventually the tapes stopped coming. When Jerome and his family moved again, we lost contact for good.

The years went by and soon I was a high school graduate. With college came the proliferation of the Internet. Years later, I opened a Facebook account. I even got a job, for crying out loud. I thought of Jerome from time-to-time. I wondered how he was doing, and occasionally would try to look him up online, but never found anything.

Not long ago, I randomly remembered that his middle name was “Wayne.” He told a group of us that while on a bus ride to a field trip. Just a random memory. He said his parents named him Wayne because one or both of them really liked John Wayne.

On a lark, this week I googled “Jerome Wayne Dickson.” I figured I would at least find out what happened to him – maybe shoot him an email and ask how he was.

On Thursday, I found this. An obituary. Jerome died on July 18, 2019.

As I said, I’m writing this five years too late.

A disease without a cure

It’s called Huntington’s disease. That’s what Jerome died of, and based on what mom told me all those years ago, I assume it’s how his mother died. Over the past couple of days, I’ve been reading up on it.

It’s a horrific, hereditary disease. There is no cure, and it causes nerve cells in the brain to gradually break down and die. The patient is born with the disease, but symptoms typically don’t begin manifesting until the patient reaches his or her 30s or 40s. As the disease progresses, patients generally require 24/7 care, until their body simply shuts down.

Because the disease is present at birth, it’s possible for anyone at any age to get tested. But the medical community refuses to test patients under the age of 18, unless they’re already exhibiting symptoms. That’s because there’s no cure – and the medical community believes a patient should be a legal adult before they’re saddled with that kind of information. As I said, it’s a horrific disease.

At first I had a hard time believing the man in the obituary picture was Jerome, but the more I read, the more I realized it was him. He spent a year in college. He was in the Army for three. Eventually, he wound up joining a support group for people with Huntington’s. He was also involved in church and Bible study at the Vineyard Central church in Norwood, Ohio, where he lived. I called and left a message there.

Yesterday, Pastor Josh Stoxen, Jerome’s pastor, called me back.

I told him who I was – that I went to school with Jerome in the 8^th grade, that we had been good friends, and that I hoped he could tell me something about him.

Pastor Stoxen was honest. He said Jerome’s final years were not easy. He spent years in a nursing home as his body gradually broke down.

But while his body was broken, his spirit wasn’t. He was still a Kansas City Chiefs fan. He still loved Star Wars and Star Trek. When the disease progressed to the point when Jerome could no longer speak, Pastor Stoxen would sometimes sit by his bedside and read “Lord of the Rings” to him. Because he loved “Lord of the Rings.”

Yeah, that was Jerome.

I told Pastor Stoxen what I knew of Jerome. About Space Camp. About the games we played when we were kids. And I thanked him for helping to take care of Jerome when things got bad.

“I’m glad you called,” he said (I’m paraphrasing). “It’s good to know what Jerome was like when life was happier. It sounds like you got a picture of what he will look like when we are with Christ and see Jerome made perfect. I’m looking forward to that day, because I only got to see him while he was ill.”

He told me Jerome had been in Bible study. He had committed his life to Christ. He loved the Lord.

If you’ve read this far, please listen to me: When Christians say Christ has conquered death, it’s not just a trite saying for Easter Sunday or the inside of bereavement cards. It’s the only hope for the human race.

Because regardless of whether you have Huntington’s in your family, each of us was already born with an incurable disease. A genetic time bomb. We’re all born with a fatal sin problem. Neither Jerome or I was perfect growing up, and I can only speak for myself, but as I got older, I got worse. It’s the sin of humanity — my sin and your sin — that set entropy in motion at the dawn of time, and with it, entropy’s ghastly servant, death.

Jerome may not have had much in his final years in terms of health or material capital, and I’m sure many pitied him, but even in his condition wasting away in that hospital bed, he was rich. Because he knew Christ. He knew the one who conquered death, who paid for his sin, and who ultimately would reverse the curse of Huntington’s. Christ’s death means that Jerome didn’t just vanish into the ether when he drew his last breath. He is with Christ now, awaiting the day when he will be resurrected in a new and perfected body.

He has joined the “great crowd of witnesses” spoken of in Hebrews 12:1. And he’s challenging all who knew him to continue running the race until we reach the finish line.

Closing thoughts

Why did I write all this?

Partly because I’m five years late, and I wasn’t able to say any of it at the funeral. Also because in a way, it’s cathartic. But I also hope someone who knew Jerome in his final years happens to stumble across this. I want them to know that the Jerome they saw in the nursing home was not the real Jerome.

I want them to know that once upon a time, Jerome memorized the lyrics to Billy Joel’s “We Didn’t Start the Fire.” And Weird Al Yankovic’s “I Want a New Duck.” That he designed his own board game. That in the 8^th grade, he liked a girl named Dawn and I liked a girl named Ericka. They need to know that he and I held on for dear life atop a shifting pile of plywood as a crazed 16-year-old with less than a year’s worth of driving experience careened his truck through Louisville. That he convinced me to ride the “pirate ship” at King’s Island and I almost got sick. That we came up with all kinds of theories about who killed Laura Palmer.

They need to know that he flew the space shuttle. And he was an outstanding commander.

Most of all, they need to know that when a new kid started a new school in the 8^th grade, he was a good friend.

Rest in peace, Jerome. I’m sorry I never saw you before the end, but I know I will see you again – and you’re even happier and healthier now than you were back then. I don’t know if there will be space missions when the new Heavens and the new Earth are here, but if there are, I’m going to demand a seat as your co-pilot.

Until then.

Ad Astra!