In Loving Memory of Derek Cournoyer

I would like to dedicate this post to a good friend of mine named Derek Cournoyer.

Back in the day, I used to live in the south part of Memphis. Fox Meadows, to be exact, which is west of Hickory Hill, and east of Parkway Village and Whitehaven (aka Blackhaven). Around when I was 10 years old and halfway through 5th grade (about 1994, or 95) we moved to an appartment near there and started searching for a house in Cordova. The next summer we found a nice house, which we still live in today, in Cordova. So we moved out there and I started the 6th grade at Cordova Middle School. When I started school there, I noticed a particular student in my class that year who was in a motorized wheelchair, named Derek. I ended up becoming good friends with this particular boy. Me and him and some of our other guy friends (because at that age hanging out with girls was still unpopular because they still had "cooties" in those days) had a lot of fun all the time hanging out with each other and became really close. This really helped me understand what its like not being able to ever walk around anyway. So why was Derek unable to walk? And why did he need a motorized wheelchair instead of a regular one? Well Derek Cournoyer had an illness known as "Muscular Distrophy." This illness was discovered when he was about 4 or 5 years old, and it is very rare for anyone to live longer than 10-15 years once this illness is discovered. So why did Derek spend all this time going to school if he wasnt going to live for very long? We'll he had hopes that one day scientists would find a cure for Muscular Distrophy and that he would be able to walk again.

Throughout 6th, 7th, 8th, and 9th grade Derek and me, and our friend Jeff were very close friends. Even in 8th grade when our entire class went on a field trip to Washington DC, instead of riding on the bus like everyone else, me and Jeff rode in a van with Derek and his mom, and Jeff's mom. As I mentioned in a previous post I could not find a particular picture of Derek, my dad, Jeff, and me all standing next to Congressman Harold Ford Jr. (this was around April or May of 1998). But there is a picture from that trip shown below, of us in a restaurant there in DC.

So anyway when we made it to 9th grade Derek, Jeff, and I all went to Cordova High School together. We even had another friend, Ross, from Cordova Middle, that went there too, and he was a good friend to Derek also. So time moved on and we maintained our strong friendship with each other. Until later in the year (around March or so, of 1999), I went to school one day to have a teacher call me out into the hall in the middle of my first class to tell me something. This teacher told me that Derek Cournoyer had passed away in his sleep that previous night!!! They took me to a room in the Guidance Counselor's office where Jeff and Ross were, and let us sit in there alone for awhile to talk with each other and mourn over the loss of a close friend of ours. Jeff and Ross cried a bit, I did a little, but not as much. We then spoke to each other about our feelings and decided that we would not be able to go through a day of school. Ross decided to stay at school for the day, but Jeff and I decided to go home. So his mom took both of us home.

The next day I left school early again. This time it was to attend his funeral, at which I was an Honorary Paul Bearer. I forgot the name of the church it was held at, but it was at the corner of Walnut Grove and Walnut Bend in Cordova, the church where Derek and his family went to. Then the burial was at the Memphis Funeral Home on Poplar, just west of I-40 and east of Yates street.

So what to make of all this? I felt that my friendship with Derek was a blessing for both of us. I hope that I was able to make his life on earth much better despite his disability, and he definently made mine much better. Not only for his good friendship with me, but for helping me to look at disabled people with a great respect for them. He helped me see them, not as something unique because they were disabled, not to stare at them at a store because of their difference, but to just look at them as any good person that I could be friends with. God richly blessed my life to give me a friendship with Derek.


Here is a picture of our trip to Washington DC back in 1998. Derek is the one on the right (of course), his mother (Mrs. Susie Cournoyer) in next to him, my dad (further left) is in the back, and halfway cut off on the far left end is Jeff.

















RIP Derek Cournoyer

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