Drawing on friends to bury happy, outgoing 30-year-old

Sad as he finds the mission, Peter Keene of Wheeling can't hold back the chuckles as he searches through his computer, pulling up photograph after photograph of his dead friend, Matt Jordan, that might be appropriate for the video montage during Saturday's memorial service.

“That's him as a baby,” Keene says, as a photograph pops onto his screen showing an altered photo of an infant Jordan sporting the full beard he wore as an adult. The photo is funny and a little odd, as was Jordan.

The 30-year-old artist from St. Charles — who worked in video production, drew comics and loved his longtime gig teaching kids to draw cartoons — never let his serious childhood illness, or the wheelchair it left him in, prevent him from enjoying life.

“He never had any problems making friends,” says Keene, 30, who grew up in Wauconda and met Jordan during their first art class together in October 2002 at the Illinois Institute of Art in Schaumburg. “I honestly don't even remember him being in the chair. The guy was everything more than a chair. He was really a very animated guy.”

Appropriately, the young art students bonded through their appreciation for the animated Japanese television cartoon series “Dragon Ball Z.” In recent years, Jordan worked alongside Keene at Xpress Video Productions in Northbrook, where his death stunned his co-workers. Fighting off a staph infection, Jordan put in a full day of work on Oct. 22 but felt really sick.

“I was the last one to see him,” says Keene, noting that he even helped the fiercely independent Jordan load his wheelchair into his Toyota Rav 4 with the hand controls that allowed him to drive. After driving to the house in St. Charles where he lived alone since the recent death of his grandmother, Jordan apparently had a heart attack while sitting in his vehicle, still parked in the driveway.

As a young boy in St. Charles, Jordan was diagnosed with neuroblastoma, a cancer that affected his nervous system. That battle and the eventual cure left him mostly paralyzed from the waist down. Using crutches and braces on his legs as a boy, he depended on the wheelchair by the time he graduated from St. Charles East High School in 2002.

“I don't think anyone could say anything bad about him,” Keene says, shrugging in the struggle to come up with something. “His worst quality is that he never answered his phone.”

One of Jordan's last images comes from a rare moment when Keene's cellphone was unattended.

Jordan grabbed it and snapped a selfie, which Keene discovered later. The image so captures Jordan's impishness that Keene drew it and posted it as the profile picture on his Facebook page in tribute to his friend.

A lover of comic books, TV, toys, pop culture, D.C. Comics superheroes, robots, monsters, books and ska bands, Jordan “was very well-read and very intelligent,” remembers friend and co-worker Kyle Nigles, 28, of Aurora. “He could talk to anybody about anything.”

One of his joys in life was teaching cartooning to children in a class at Tony & Friends Art Studio in St. Charles for the past seven years.

“The kids all loved him,” says owner Tony Carnesecchi, who says he met Jordan when the artist was 13 and taking the class he'd grow up to teach. “He had a good following.

“He was an idol to those kids. They are pretty broken up. It's a tragic loss.”

Jordan drew some artwork for Less Than Jake, one of his favorite ska bands. He was working on a comic book and had lots of other projects in the works, Keene says.

With his parents divorced, and Jordan living with his grandmother after the death of his mother five years ago, the artist still was coping with his grandmother's death and certainly hadn't made any final plans for himself, Keene says.

Keene set up a fund on his Haff-Art.com website to collect money to pay for the funeral and burial. Any excess money will be donated to the children's hospital that treated Jordan in his youth, Keene says.

Visitation for Jordan begins at 9 a.m. Saturday at Moss-Norris Funeral Home, 100 S. Third St. in St. Charles, with a memorial service following at 10 a.m.

Sunday would have been Jordan's 31st birthday. His friends plan to celebrate his day without him.

“He's definitely a person to celebrate. He had so much energy,” Keene says.

“It's ridiculous how hard it is to believe he's gone.”