Editor’s note: In this dip into the Toy Fund vault, we bring you a story originally published on Dec. 19, 2002. Like this story, many people who have donated to the Toy Fund this year have done so in memory of young ones who left us too soon.
In the 30 years that Louise Swider, a fourth-grade teacher at Berkshire Trail Elementary School in Cummington, has been teaching, she has seen about 550 children come through her classroom.
Joshua Jordan, who died in May at age 12, was one of the special ones.
For that reason, Swider made a donation in Joshua’s memory this week to the Sidney F. Smith Toy Fund, which distributes vouchers to help families in need buy holiday gifts for their children.
“I am sending $25 in memory of Joshua Jordan of Cummington, who passed away this May 2002 from leukemia and whose birthday is coming up on Dec. 21st,” Swider wrote in a note accompanying her check.
“It is a shame such a young and wonderful person was taken away from family and friends. We miss Josh and he will always be remembered dearly.”
Swider said years ago, it was her custom to donate to the fund, but for a number of years she found other outlets for giving at the holidays, and since Josh’s cancer diagnosis in 1999, she had focused her gift-giving efforts on him.
“Josh and I had more than a teacher-pupil relationship; we were friends,” she said. “He was very special in my heart.”
Swider said she still remembers the November day in 1999 when Joshua seemed not quite himself at recess. While the other children were busy playing, he seemed ill, and she invited him to sit with her.
Soon after that, she said, the Jordan family learned that Joshua had leukemia.
“It was just devastating,” said Swider.
Classmates and Swider sent notes home to Joshua, and he returned to school that year as much as his health and treatment schedule would allow.
Throughout that year, she said, he remained a shining example of how one makes the best of life’s circumstances.
“He didn’t want anyone feeling sorry or feeling pity for him at all, and in fact, he always made the rest of the kids and myself feel good,” said Swider. “He was always cheerful; we felt good around him.”
Joshua and friends appeared on the “Today” TV show in 2000 after schoolmates, teachers and family members shaved their heads in solidarity as he lost his hair during treatment for his disease.
But Swider said Joshua felt “funny and awkward” about all the attention. “He just wanted to be a normal kid like everybody else,” she said.
Swider treated him like that as much as possible. Aware of his particular sense of humor and of the delight most children his age take in gas-passing humor, she gave him a device that made suggestive, rude noises.
She said Joshua got a big kick out of using it to play practical jokes on nurses at the hospital.
One day, Swider said, she came home to that sound, and nothing else, on her answering machine, and she knew who had left it.
“When I asked him, he denied it, but it was him, with that little machine that I gave him, that little gizmo,” she said.
Joshua took pleasure in little things like jokes, something many people around him began picking up on.
“He always looked on the bright side every single day,” said Swider. “He brought a lot of humor and a lot of smiles to my life.”
Swider stayed in touch with Joshua after he left her class, first when he moved up to the fifth-grade classroom next door, then when he went to middle school in Dalton.
She sometimes visited him at his Cummington home and occasionally, he would visit her in Florence.
She said this Christmas, and Saturday, his birthday, will be especially hard on his parents Russell and Donna Jordan, as well as his brothers, Jacob, who is 10 and now in Swider’s class, and second-grader Jared.