Collegio Online

Issue date: 2/14/08 Section: Front Page

Media Credit: Jones

Benjamin Hendrick remembers the day he was sitting on the couch watching TV when his roommate threw a 2-liter bottle at him and laughed.

"He comes running out of his bedroom and he kind of startles me and throws a 2-liter bottle at me and it landed in my lap. It was full of lit bottle rockets," Hendrick said. "Our house was quite cloudy that night."

Hendrick has a lot of stories that show Brandon Jones' ornery sense of humor, but what he remembers most is how Jones refused to let his cancer control his life.

"I've never seen anybody or even heard of anybody deal with it like he did and I think that's one thing that he should be remembered for," Hendrick said.

Jones lost his battle with Ewing's sarcoma, a rare form of cancer, at 12:41 a.m. last Thursday. He was diagnosed in 2005 with the disease, which is most commonly found in bone or soft tissue in children and young adults.

Hendrick describes Jones as someone who always put other people's feelings first, even when it meant hiding the severity of his illness to avoid others' concerns.

"I think he spared us a lot of the truth about his illness; I just couldn't man up and ask him," Hendrick said. "I knew that if he wanted me to know, he would have told me. I mean, hell, he was barely worried."
Dan Thompson, a friend of Jones since high school, agrees that Jones wanted to hide his illness.

"I think he wanted it to be a little more personal, just himself," Thompson, freshman in radiology, said. "If he needed to talk about it, he knew that we were here to talk about it with him."

Jones filled his life with humor, Hendrick said, and he was determined for others to do the same. He was constantly playing jokes and making people laugh.

"If he saw the way that some people are handling it, I can seriously picture him saying, 'How about you suck it up, you little bitches,'" Hendrick said.

Jones convinced his friends to approach his illness with humor as well. Thompson explained that the cancer became somewhat of an ongoing joke between their close-knit group.

"I could come over and say something about how crappy my day went and he'd be like, 'Yeah, well I have cancer,'" Thompson said.

Hendrick told similar stories.
"Somebody would be like, 'Man, I've gotta get up early, I've gotta get up at 9 and go to class' and he'd be like, 'I've gotta get up and go to chemotherapy at 8 in the morning, one more drink,'" Hendrick said and smiled.

Continued...

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