Alexus Mackenzye Dick and Trinity Jagdeo were 5 years old when they met on the blacktop at Mary F. Janvier School in rural Franklinville, Gloucester County.
While Dick isn’t around to tell the story anymore, Jagdeo remembers it well: They played hopscotch, but not in the traditional way. Dick zipped through the squares in her wheelchair. Jagdeo, a Vineland resident, said it amazed her.
“I’ve told the story 1,000 times,” said Jagdeo, 25. “But now that I think about it — and I’ve revisited the location — there was nothing else for her to do.”
The pair quickly became best friends. They bickered over the Justin Bieber tattoo Dick got at 15, gossiped at sleepovers, and traded lip gloss recommendations.
There’s a reason Jagdeo repeats those tales so often.
When they were still teenagers, Jagdeo founded a nonprofit, From We Can’t to We Can, inspired by her best friend. She has self-published comic books that turn local kids with disabilities into superheroes, hosted fashion shows for models with disabilities, frequented local TV stations, and gifted thousands of pieces of medical equipment to families denied by insurance or who can’t afford the supplies. Jagdeo has talked about Dick on social media for years, including to her nearly 50,000 TikTok followers.
The daily posts haven’t stopped since Dick died five months ago at 25 due to complications related to spinal muscular atrophy type 2, a genetic disease diagnosed in childhood that causes progressive muscle weakness.
“One of the things she said was, ‘I wish I could help people.’ … And so, in my heart, I knew that at that point, I wasn’t going to just let that conversation stay there,” Jagdeo said.
Now, another family is benefitting from the efforts to keep Dick’s memory alive.
Domenique Meyer, 33, lives in Aberdeen Township, Monmouth County, with her husband Mike and two children, Mikey and Mia. Born prematurely at 30 weeks, a lack of oxygen to Mikey’s brain left him with severe spastic quadriplegic cerebral palsy.
“He knows our voices, loves being talked to and cuddled, and has his own special way of showing us what he likes and dislikes,” Meyer said. “He has been fighting since the very beginning of his life.”
At 3 years old, Mikey is blind, nonverbal, unable to sit independently, and has multiple seizures per day. He receives his nutrition through a gastrostomy tube since he has a hard time swallowing. His disabilities mean a lot of time spent on care, and on one income, it’s been hard to get by, Meyer said. Their family fell behind on household bills as medical expenses piled up.
“When you have a medically complex child, life does not stop because bills are due,” Meyer said. “There have been so many times when Mikey needed us at an appointment, in the hospital, or at home, and work simply had to come second.”
When Meyer reached out to From We Can’t to We Can for a medical stroller that would better suit Mikey’s needs, she explained their financial stressors to Jagdeo. Since the nonprofit had recently received thousands of dollars from anonymous donors, Jagdeo decided it was time to fulfill her best friend’s wish.
The Alexus Mackenzye Legacy Fund provided Meyer and her family with about $5,500 that went toward their mortgage and brought their utility bills up to date. And while times are still hard, Meyer said the foundation’s support gave them hope.
“For the first time in a while, it felt like we could breathe again and focus on our children instead of constantly worrying about what bill was coming next,” Meyer said.
The Meyers will attend Roar for a Reason at the Edelman Fossil Park & Museum in Mantua on Saturday, the first major event and fundraiser the nonprofit has hosted since Dick died. There, Jagdeo said she plans to release a hundred butterflies, Dick’s favorite, and read a letter addressed to her best friend. Kids with disabilities will walk the runway, and Jagdeo will introduce her newest book, Jaiyana and the Jainosaurus, which takes place at the museum and is based on the experiences of a local child with autism and a rare brain condition. She’ll introduce the new legacy fund to the public, which she said she hopes will support a family in need annually from now on.
Jagdeo has kept busy in the meantime. She still posts on social media every day, usually about Dick, and recently flew to Michigan to judge this year’s Miss Wheelchair USA competition. She’s been putting in hours on an outdoor memory garden for Dick in her yard, and she said she hopes monarch butterflies hatch this weekend in time for the celebration.
“Some people say, ‘This person was my world,’” Jagdeo said. “And for me, she wasn’t just my world. She was the world. I created a world because of her.”
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