The day Jadzia noticed Adam

Recently I have been updating old posts on this blog to fix broken image and video links. It has been a fun experience to revisit these stories, many of which I had long forgotten. But one story from 2008 really hit home in a surprising and bittersweet way. (I suggest reading it before continuing)

The story involves a boy named Adam Hardin.

We never knew Adam. In fact, he died several years before Yoli and I moved to Ferguson in 2003. He had been a student at Sts. John and James, the same Catholic school my father attended in the 1960s. Today it’s called Blessed Teresa of Calcutta School, and we live less than a block away.

When Jadzia was nearly three years old, I would walk with her to the playground at Blessed Teresa on summer days. On one of these walks, she noticed a stone marker under a tree near the baseball field with Adam’s face etched on it, and she wanted to know who he was. I did my best to explain.

As I noted in my 2008 post, I soon forgot about the marker and this conversation. But Jadzia didn’t. Months later, when she said “We’re going to see Adam,” during a walk to the playground, it took me a few minutes to understand who and what she was talking about.

I’m ashamed to say that even after that experience, even after writing the story down for posterity, I forgot about it again — this time for nearly two decades.

A lot has changed in that time. So when I stumbled across that old blog post this week, it really hit hard.

Jadzia has her own tree and her own marker now. They are in Ferguson’s January-Wabash Park, overlooking the pool where she used to watch her siblings compete in swim meets.

She died in 2020, a result of Marfan Syndrome, a connective tissue disorder she lived with all her life.

Today I searched the Post-Dispatch archives for Adam, to see if I could learn when he died. I found an uplifting story from late 1999 about Blues players visiting kids in local hospitals to cheer them up. Adam was in the hospital for leukemia treatment, but he was very excited to talk about hockey and have his photo taken with Bob Bassen, Jochen Hecht and Terry Yake. The story was written by my former colleague Kathleen Nelson.

But then, 7 months later, his obituary ran. Adam died on July 11, 2000. He was buried at Sacred Heart Cemetery in Florissant. He was 16. Jadzia was nearly the same age when she died, just one month shy of 15.

All those years ago, I had to explain to my precocious little girl why Adam’s face was etched onto this small stone under a tree. This is how I recorded it:

I explained to her that I didn’t know what happened to Adam, but that he had died and now he was in heaven with Father God. All of us are going to die someday, and we never know when God might want to bring us home, whether we’ll be young like Adam or very old.

I couldn’t have known how prescient these words were. Couldn’t have known that my own darling Jadzia would also be one with such an early departure date.

But I’m so glad she noticed Adam’s marker. So glad that she forced me to think about these things back then — and to think about them again now.

Long may her memory live on, like Adam’s.

Through us. Through her friends. That marker. That tree.