Memorial Service: 11 am, Wednesday, April 23, 2014 at The Reformed Church, Bronxville
Wayne P. Jordan of Bronxville, New York died peacefully in his sleep on April 10, 2014 after a 20 year struggle with Parkinson’s disease. He is survived by his loving family and remembered most for his sweet and gentle spirit. A memorial service will be held on Wednesday, April 23, 2014 at 11:00 am at the Reformed Church of Bronxville, 180 Pondfield Road. The family requests that in lieu of flowers contributions be made to the Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson’s research. You may go to the web site michaeljfox.org to make a tribute.
Wayne Jordon: We Remember
Harrison Kohler and I visited Wayne on April 2nd and 3rd, Harrison coming up from Atlanta and I from Houston. Both of us came with heavy hearts because we knew that, most likely, we were coming for our last visit with one of our best friends. Still, both of us expected to be talking with Wayne about our knowing one another since our meeting on the campus of Baylor University in the fall of 1960.
We would recall Wayne’s athleticism as a member of the University track team; we would recall mutual friends such as Jon and Annette Lindsey, Jerry and Nancy Welch, Elaine Moore Bounds, Doc and Meb Powell, Frank McArthur, Bob Bennett, Barry Click, Jim and Janice Goode, Joe and Sylvia Thompson, and our wives Sybil Estess and Francine Kohler—and others, too many either to remember or mention. We would recall, with some envy, the long list of girl friends that debonair Wayne had as an undergraduate!
We might recall the trip that Wayne and a few of us took to a used appliance store in Louisville, Kentucky, where, in the fall of 1964, we studied theology together. Several of us thought it was a crazy idea, but Wayne insisted. One Saturday, with Wayne directing, I drove my 1961 Impala to the store and four of us pitched in to buy a full-size, used Westinghouse. With that frig sticking out from the trunk, we drove back to Mullins Hall on the seminary campus. The four of us lugged the thing to the 3rd floor and set it up in Wayne’s room. There, for several years, every morning, Wayne cooked eggs, toast, and sausage or bacon for his friends, with coffee and Welch’s grape juice to drink. Wayne stacked the empty Welch cans in pyramid-form against the wall, installing what I thought of as a piece of pop art in that incongruous place. We would laugh again to remember the night the pyramid collapsed and sent the noise of a clanging ruckus through that cavernous building.
But arriving at Wayne’s room, Harrison and I realized that our expectations were not to be met. Three or four days earlier, Parkinson’s had started to exact its inexorable and final toll. Harrison and I felt that Wayne had reached a low from which he likely would not return. We were thus there to say our final goodbyes.
For some hours on Tuesday afternoon and again on Wednesday, we sat and held our friend’s hand. We offered him spoonfuls of water; we placed shards of ice in his mouth; we talked of old times as though Wayne were following every word. Perhaps he was. Indeed, on Wednesday afternoon, both of us thought that almost surely Wayne knew that two of his many friends were with him as he drew near to crossing the bar. It occurred to me that Harrison and I were standing in for many others who would have wanted to be there, saying goodbye.
I don’t know what Harrison said to Wayne when he went in the room to bid farewell; but I suspect that his words were something like mine. I thanked Wayne for being my friend; I told him how much he means to my wife Sybil and to me. I thanked him for his unrelenting concern for our son Barrett. I told him that he had lived a good life and that he had been kind and generous and open to friends and strangers alike. I thanked him for being, in many ways, more than a brother to me. I kissed him on the forehead and said a prayer of gratitude for him, his life, his friendship. I said goodbye and left the room, turning as I did to take one last look at Wayne.
Harrison and I made a sad walk back to our hotel. Though sadness darkened the afternoon, gratitude was already breaking through. I am sure that many other of Wayne’s friends have been feeling the same: grief, yes, but gratitude, gratitude, gratitude. Seeing our friend, somehow made it is easier for Harrison and me to accommodate to Wayne’s death. Still, it will be a long time before we grow accustomed to his absence.
As the shadows of grief subside, our gratitude for Wayne shines ever brighter. We are grateful not only for him, but also for his remarkable wife Madeline and her extraordinary family, all of whom made Wayne indissolubly one of their own. How fortunate Wayne was to be taken into the hearts of such a generous family, each one of whom showered appreciation, respect, and love on the gentle man from Georgia.
Over these last days, I have thought many times of those words of Wordsworth: “The best portion of a good man’s life: his little, nameless unremembered acts of kindness and love.”
So it is with Wayne. Wordsworth, though, is wrong in one respect: we remember.
Ted Estess
Houston, Texas
Wayne Posey Jordan and I met when we were just 18 years old, as freshmen at
Baylor University. Wayne had come to Baylor on a track scholarship. The man I
married later, Ted L. Estess, met Wayne in the athletic dormitory in freshman year.
Wayne was always super sweet and kind. He loved to tease me, and I suppose that
at that age I was quite teasable. (A small town Mississippi girl I was, and Wayne had been born in
Vicksburg, Mississippi.) Wayne went to seminary in Louisville, Kentucky, as did Ted and a bunch
of their other Baylor friends. Wayne stayed there four years. I married Ted
after two years, and commuted back to Lexington, KY to finish my master’s degree
there. Wayne got a two-year master’s degree in Hospital Chaplaincy work at Bright Divinity School, and then came to Houston,
to do a one year residency as hospital chaplain. All of this
time and during these years, we kept close touch with Wayne (who I should add
was one of the two men in our wedding in Mississippi in August, 1966). Sometime
during Wayne’s Houston year, he decided to travel to New York to work in Al Lowenstein’s political
campaign for US Representative. (I am not sure why, but he had read about Lowenstein and apparently agreed with
his politics. These were the terrible and painful political times, the 1960s.) On Long Island, working in
the campaign, Wayne met a woman whom he married. She was divorced, with three sons whom Wayne helped to raise.
Wayne later divorced, lived in New York city, and met the lovely widow Madeline, and
her four children. They became like his own. He became a lawyer, in New York. He suffered illness, but
never complained- at least not to Ted and me, and we talked often. Once, after Wayne was in the nursing home,
and could still use his cell phone, he called me at home, in the middle of the day. He had something on
his mind: his death. He said to me, “Listen, Sybil. I have done tons of research on Parkinson’s. I know
how people die from it. It will not be pretty. I do not want you to come here, and I do not want you to
grieve yourself to death. You have a son, a grandchild, and Ted, who needs you. I love you and always know
that. I may not last long.”
I will never forget Wayne, and our love for him and our mutual friendship and
love. Wherever he is, he has not forgotten us.
We loved you, Wayne.
P.S. Wayne was the nephew of the noted writer and radical Christian, Clarence
Jordan (his father’s brother) who founded Koiania farm, in Georgia.
Sybil Pittman Estess, Houston
WAYNE JORDAN
1942-2014
Wayne was one of the first people I met at Baylor when he and I arrived there as freshmen in 1960. I was a track and field fan, Wayne was at Baylor on a track scholarship, and naturally, one of our first conversations was the subject of track and field. Wayne placed in the 330 intermediate hurdles in Fayetteville, Arkansas, when Baylor won the Southwest Conference Track and Field Championship in 1963.
After graduating from Baylor, Wayne obtained Masters of Divinity degrees from Southern Baptist Theological Seminary and Bright Divinity School. However, he spent most of his career practicing law in New York City and Long Island. Wayne helped persuade me that I ought to go to law school.
He died on April 10, 2014, in Mt. Vernon, New York. He is survived by his wife Madeline and four step-children and their families.
Despite his athleticism, Wayne has been in ill health for many of the last years of his life. He had recovered from two types of cancer but suffered from Parkinson’s disease for many years, which was the eventual cause of his death. The last few years of his life, he had been confined to a nursing home.
In a healthcare sense Wayne did not age well. However, in his book Aging and God, Harold Koenig wrote, “Successful aging is defined by crisis and involves how individuals meet the difficulties they encounter.” By that criteria Wayne aged extraordinarily well. Whenever I went to NY to visit Wayne in the nursing home, I was always struck by how his openness connected him to the staff and other care givers.
Wayne faced years of ill health with tenacity and courage. When I was in the infantry in Vietnam, I on occasion saw heroic acts by certain individuals. Yet those acts of physical courage pale in comparison with the way Wayne dealt with his years of health challenges.
He was a good man, and I am grateful to have been his friend. He blessed my life.
Harrison Kohler
Atlanta, GA
Leave a Condolence