But Jordan did not stand crouched in the typical ready position. Rather, the young boy hopped up and down and side to side, bearing his signature infectious smile. He could not have been more full of life.
Another clip showed a young Moore-Fields dancing in a school concert alongside his classmates to the sounds of “Whoop there it is.” In another, Jordan gleamed with delight—Amherst folder in hand—upon his acceptance to the College. Others pictured Jordan with friends from home, friends from college and with his family: his father, Mark Fields; his mother, Jacqueline Moore; his brother Merrick, now a high school sophomore; and his twin sisters Kendal and Lindsey, both nine.
A few clips showed Jordan on his first days of various school years. Each time, Jordan predicted the year ahead would be a “good” one and his siblings eagerly wished him luck.
In every picture and clip on this retrospective video and the slideshow created by Kat Black ’10 screened earlier, Jordan boasted his quintessential smile. As students, faculty, staff and friends gathered to “mourn [Jordan’s] loss and celebrate his life” on Sunday night, as Dean of New Students and Professor of Psychology Dean Hart said in his introduction, the video screen rotated between pictures of Jordan with his Amherst friends and the word that has come to encapsulate Jordan, or at least capture, perhaps his most powerful feature: “smile.”
The 19-year-old Moore-Fields, who had planned to major in political science at the College, died on Sunday, Oct. 12, just after 10 p.m. when the car in which he was traveling back to campus after a Fall Break trip crashed on Interstate 91 in Holyoke, Mass. The three others in the car, including the driver—all Amherst students—survived the collision. The College community, still on break, was notified of the accident Monday morning.
Dean Hart, who traveled to Chicago for Saturday’s funeral with eight other Amherst community members, began the College’s memorial service by recounting how welcoming and accomadating the Moore-Fields family was towards the Amherst contingent in Chicago.
Moore-Fields’ immediate family altered the seating arrangements in the church pews that were filled to their approximately 350-person capacity so that the Amherst contingent could sit directly behind them for the “symbolism and the reality of how Jordan felt about Amherst College and we feel about him.” Photographs scattered throughout the Moore-Fields house showed Jordan in Amherst t-shirts, Jordan receiving his letter of acceptance from the College, and Jordan standing proudly at the College War Memorial, with the Holyoke Mountain Range in the background.
Dean Hart also conveyed Jordan’s prowess as a writer. After Moore-Fields’ death, he went back to look at Jordan’s application essay, a response to the Scott Turow ’70 quote: “Only in the mystery novel are we delivered final and unquestionable solutions. The joke to me is that fiction gives you a truth that reality can’t deliver.” While Hart would not reveal the content of the essay crafted by the “beautiful writer,” he explained that his trip to Chicago has led him to take exception to Turow’s statement. For, as Hart said, “Our contact with [Moore-Fields’] family has introduced me to the reality of the concepts we only talk about,” concepts like community, family, kindness and home. “We learned from Jordan’s family that Amherst College was his home and that’s something I’ll take away with me forever,” Hart ended.
Black followed Hart’s remarks by describing a gathering of a few Amherst students in Chicago this summer. After an evening of activities, the group went to relax on a field by Lake Michigan. Black remembers just lying there, no one having much to say after a long night. But that did not matter. She found happiness and satisfaction “just being around Jordan.”
While Black said she did not get to give Jordan one last hug, “I wouldn’t tell him goodbye,” she explained. “I would tell him thank you. Thank you for letting me be one of the lucky people to get to know you, if even for a short while. Thank you for always putting me in a better mood just by smiling and making me smile…” Black proceeded to introduce a slideshow she made of memories of Jordan from his time at the College.
Tissue boxes were strategically placed at the side of each aisle to help mourners wipe away tears.
As the program allowed anyone in attendance to share a few words of remembrance, Andre Gray ’10E told the audience, “To do [Jordan] justice, think of him and smile in his honor.” Professor of Political Science Pavel Machala, Moore-Fields’ teacher and advisor, spoke of Jordan’s “modesty,” his lack of pretension, that “same gentle smile” so characteristic of him, and how he was “so much ready to be here for three more years.” Miguel Gonzalez ’11 called Moore-Fields “everybody’s boy” and said, “You didn’t know what was missing in the room until [Jordan] walked in.”
Jessica Saffold ’09 elaborated on the same evening by the Chicago lakefront Black described. What Black left out from her story was the appearance of a large raccoon “the size of a small dog” that scared almost the whole group. But not Jordan. He was just “chilling,” Saffold said, and told them, “There’s nothing to be afraid of.”
“[Jordan] was not about fear, not about worries,” she explained. “He looked life in the face and wasn’t afraid.” While Saffold regrets not getting to know Moore-Fields better, she acknowledged, “I am thankful I had that night, that raccoon, that lesson.”
While he did not speak at the service, Peter Stein ’09 says he considers Moore-Fields “possibly the nicest and most easy-going person [he has] ever met.”
“He was usually pretty quiet, but when he did talk he usually said something either very funny or meaningful,” Stein said.
“It becomes hard for me to think about a time when Jordan wasn’t at this school hanging out, cracking jokes at what always seemed to be the perfect time,” wrote M.J. Smith ’09 on the College’s online remembrance board. “[Jordan] was one of the coolest, most chill dudes on campus. He had a way about him that was quiet, but he never let you forget he was in the room. He just never said anything that didn’t need to be said. He was real at all times and he was an honorable person that was fair and loyal.”
As the memorial service on Sunday night drew to a close, President Tony Marx expressed how it’s “hard to see the fairness” in Moore-Fields’ death, the taking of a life full of “so much promise.” He continued to explore the “existential question” of “what kind of world, what kind of fate, what kind of god would choose to take innocence.” He posed, “How could we possibly make sense of a design that would take someone like Jordan… unthinkably, randomly, for some purpose that one cannot imagine?” Marx articulated the pain in the “feeling of the best being taken from us unfairly, prematurely and the terribleness of us not knowing” what Moore-Fields would have become.
In Marx’s first phone call to Moore-Fields’ parents, Mr. Fields and Mrs. Moore delivered the Amherst community what Marx called a “simple, powerful and breathtaking message” for parents to give at a moment of such pain: “The best way for us to honor Jordan is to keep strong and carry on.”
In the end, Marx came to a reasoning that might, in some sense, help “heal the pain.” Moore-Fields’ death, he said, “inspires us to live our lives in a way Jordan would have been proud of. He did not leave us instructions. We will have to figure it out ourselves. Perhaps that is the plan.”
And maybe smiling’s the answer.