Jordan  was thirty-four when he died, and he’d fought  hard every single day of his life to live, to breathe, to be normal. He did not want to be defined by his illness.

Jordan died  of cystic fibrosis. I didn’t know anything about the genetic disease until I married Jordan’s dad thirteen years ago, but I learned fast. The disease is fickle, it attacks, consumes victims alive. It kills some young. Eats them up.  Keeps them from breathing precious air. The disease leaves others alone for a long long time. Some CF patients  can live into their fifties and sixties.  Jordan’s case was particularly severe. He spent  time in hospitals, getting his lungs “cleaned out”  with IV antibiotics. When I met Jordan in 1994, he could barely walk up the stairs. He was a college student at Santa Clara University, and despite the cannibalistic CF, h e graduated  on time with his class, with his friends.

Jordan’s friends were very important to him. He wanted to be like the other guys. He wanted to go to parties and play cards and start a career.

But, as I said, Jordan could barely walk up the stairs.

He underwent a highly successful lung transplant (the donor was a law student who’d been in a car accident) and began to live life fully about seven years ago. He could finally breathe. He could walk up ten flights of stairs. He could date. He could work. (He became a mortgage broker and invested in real estate.) He could share happy times with  friends.

Many of his friends were childhood pals. Like Dierks. During all the years that Jordan struggled with is health, all those scary pre-transplant years,  Dierks worked at his music. Dierks became a celebrity, a country western idol.

He could have ignored Jordan, but he was always a true, attentive friend. He was Jordan’s friend when Jordan was healthy, and he was Jordan’s friend when Jordan’s was sick. Jordan’s health started declining last year after a doctor carelessly pierced an artery, very nearly causing Jordan to bleed to death.  Jordan never really got better.  He fought off death day after day after day. His lungs went into chronic rejection and his kidneys failed, and finally, he died. At the moment of his death, his mother and father held their hands over his heart.

Dierks was devastated. He wrote this  Song for Jordan

It was Dierk’s last gift.